You shouldn’t like this stuff, but it’s such a rush.
A young life of spectacular crime and drugs nearly leads to a life of writing—but merciful fate and powerful addictions intervene.
Interrupting his hell-bent, breakneck narrative from time to time with threats of literary fiction, Little, who introduced Bad Bobbie Prine in his 1998 Another Day in Paradise, keeps threatening to turn Bobbie from a life of very hard drugs, punk rock, and surprisingly successful felonies to a less fevered existence as a writer, but the reader can only pray along with St. Augustine. Not yet. Please. Because when Bobbie does turn peaceable (as did the formerly criminal author), we will stop seeing with blinding clarity inside the smack-riddled mind of a brilliant kid doing everything wrong, which is a rare sight, and see instead inside the mind of a writer, which you can see anytime. Bobbie’s new adventures start up in 1975 in a hellish Indiana youth facility where it takes total concentration to stay alive and in one piece. The politics is racial, of course, and the resentment and hostilities make Bosnia look like summer camp. All Bobbie wants is to escape, which, after a gruesome battle, he does, fleeing with his mates across the Illinois line to hook up with some old criminal chums who have taken up farming and religion. Sort of. When his wounds have recovered and the rural life palls, Bobbie heads for New York to reunite with Sydney, the con artist whose treachery put him in prison after their last job. Syd’s moved up to white-collar crime, and she’s making bundles of money and living the high life. Bobbie, re-addicted to heroin, gets hooked on big money, big sex, and big music. His career path will give him enough polish to pass for civilized and, after some on-the-job training in basic fraud, eventually take him to Boston, where he will meet hard men and a college girl with a nose for literary talent. His graduation to really big crime leads, of course, to really big trouble.
You shouldn’t like this stuff, but it’s such a rush.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-28291-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2001
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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