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DOUBLE BLIND

A thought-provoking, smartly told story that brings philosophy, medicine, and neuroscience into boardroom and bedroom.

St. Aubyn moves on from a troubled King Lear type (Dunbar, 2017) to characters with greater problems still concerning life, death, and figuring out how much caviar and cocaine are enough.

This is a novel of ideas—more specifically, the idea that somehow the world can be saved, whether through rewilding a patch of English forest or employing virtual reality to battle schizophrenia. Everyone involved represents an aspect of mind, from Sebastian, a young man battling mental illness, to Lucy, a principal player who has a frightening encounter with a tumor. Her sympathetic surgeon is of help: When Lucy, brilliant at both science and business, asks if she should avoid any kind of activity, given her condition, he replies, “My only advice is not to drink a case of champagne and go swimming at night in shark-infested waters.” That’s good advice under any circumstances. Lucy swims in the sharky waters of venture capital, working for a man suggestively named Hunter Sterling, who uses his brain and infinite fortune both to execute forward-looking mergers and acquisitions and to explore just about every narcotic there is, a habit that opens the way for moments of bad personal judgment and vulnerability, as when a greedy associate, urged by his wife and sensing the boss’s addictive behavior, tries to engineer a financial coup: “Money had turned his nervously cheerful, basically shy, nerd of a wife into Lady Macbeth.” Even the pure-hearted, ecological character called Francis—think Assisi, which figures in St. Aubyn’s elegant, carefully plotted tale—isn’t above the human fray; he’s ostensibly the faithful lover of Olivia, Lucy’s best friend, but he gets tangled up with a rich investor, which gives the story a bit of erotic frisson and some attention to our vile bodies just at a time when the characters are exploring the higher mysteries of the mind. More humorous but just as intellectually inclined as Richard Powers and David Mitchell, among other contemporaries, St. Aubyn explores human foibles even as he brilliantly takes up headier issues of the human brain in sickness and in health.

A thought-provoking, smartly told story that brings philosophy, medicine, and neuroscience into boardroom and bedroom.

Pub Date: June 1, 2021

ISBN: 978-0-374-28219-6

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2021

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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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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

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DEMON COPPERHEAD

An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.

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Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.

It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior. Like pretty much everyone else in Lee County, Virginia, hollowed out economically by the coal and tobacco industries, he sees himself as someone with no prospects and little worth. One of Kingsolver’s major themes, hit a little too insistently, is the contempt felt by participants in the modern capitalist economy for those rooted in older ways of life. More nuanced and emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it. Kingsolver’s ferocious indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, angrily stated by a local girl who has become a nurse, is in the best Dickensian tradition, and Demon gives a harrowing account of his descent into addiction with his beloved Dori (as naïve as Dickens’ Dora in her own screwed-up way). Does knowledge offer a way out of this sinkhole? A committed teacher tries to enlighten Demon’s seventh grade class about how the resource-rich countryside was pillaged and abandoned, but Kingsolver doesn’t air-brush his students’ dismissal of this history or the prejudice encountered by this African American outsider and his White wife. She is an art teacher who guides Demon toward self-expression, just as his friend Tommy provokes his dawning understanding of how their world has been shaped by outside forces and what he might be able to do about it.

An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.

Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-06-325-1922

Page Count: 560

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: July 13, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022

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