A first collection of three long pieces, all set in the 1940s- -``dark and ignorant times'' for the small-town folk that McClanahan (The Natural Man, 1983, etc.) continues to bring to life in his inimitable country-lyrical style. ``Juanita and the Frog Prince,'' the unlikely tale of a ``hoosegow scullery maid'' and a jail inmate with two noses, boldly veers into the fabulistic, with the slutty girl and the freak thug uniting in a weird transmigration of souls. Juanita Pence, knocked up by the ``devious, dissolute, thieving, and mean'' Warren Skidmore Harding, unburdens herself to the toad-ugly Luther ``Two Noses'' Jukes, who's sitting in jail for blowing up Lugnuts Bludgins, another no-count who made fun of Luther's face. As a child, Luther had been sold into sideshow infamy by his crazy mother. On the road, he appeared with the smooth-talking Rev. Philander Cosmo Rexroat, who changed his act from itinerant preacher to freak-show barker. Rexroat's presence links all three stories. ``The Congress of Wonders'' records a day in the life of his sad and seedy sideshow, circa 1944. Mostly ``a pickled-punk show'' of manufactured oddities, its one true attraction is JoJo, a true ``morphadyke,'' who triples as the Bodiless Head and the Bearded Lady. Everyone pays to see the strange hermaphrodite ``pokerate itself,'' but the real wonder is its genuine insight into the future. Finally, in ``Finch's Song: A School Bus Tragedy,'' Rexroat offers his ``Electro-Magno-Static-Diagnosis Machine'' (formerly an electric chair in his sideshow) to diagnose the ailments of Clarence ``Finch'' Fronk, a pitiful and sickly school-bus driver who's tormented by his older half-brother, a bitter and mean pool-hall owner who drives Clarence to a transcendent suicide. McClanahan's old-timey slang and down-home wit endow his trash, drifters, cons, and rubes with poetry and magic.
Pub Date: May 28, 1996
ISBN: 1-887178-12-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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