A tiresomely macho protagonist detracts from insights into the sexual divide.
A fictionalized account of a sex addict’s experiences in the Far East and India.
The pseudonymous author is a businessman who spent many years working for an Australian company in Asia. He’s turned those years into an occasionally entertaining, semiautobiographical novel about the “sexual divide” in which the protagonist, Eddie Expat, is an unrepentant sex addict. “[W]e are all—men and women both—sitting in a dysfunctional canoe of some sort or other and despite the divide defined by the misogynists: misandrist camps, we are in this together,” Expat says in one of the book’s more lucid passages. The story follows the married Expat’s “road out of misogyny-city” by recounting a seemingly endless series of sexual adventures with bar girls, prostitutes and others in Malaysia, Thailand and elsewhere. While declaiming hard-core pornography, Expat goes for the graphic, most notably in a description of a visit to a Bangkok brothel where he is entertained by a toothless “old hag.” “Some men lose their hearts in Thailand,” he remembers. “I lost my conscience!” There are pangs of remorse about his behavior that interrupt the parade of misogyny, but it’s only after Expat engages in a ménage à trois that his conscience kicks in. “There in the mirror was the womanizing fat farang sex tourist I despised,” Expat says. “A greying, slightly overweight, middle aged man with his arms around two petite Thai beauties….Not content to look like some sleazy sex tourist—I’d then followed through and acted the part.” Expat ends up in India, a “1.6 billion headcount whirlpool of a country” with a much stricter moral code, where he goes “cold turkey” and somehow becomes “far wiser and balanced than the addict that had landed in India.” He offers some thoughts on the current crisis of sexual violence in India—“[p]oorly educated Neanderthal rural thugs” are the root of the problem—but readers are likely to tire of his relentless machismo. His eventual enlightenment—“Be happy with what you’ve got”—is small recompense for accompanying him on such a tedious sexual journey.
A tiresomely macho protagonist detracts from insights into the sexual divide.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2013
ISBN: 978-1491272152
Page Count: 338
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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