Supertaut storytelling, after a dandy start, wanders off into pat implications of psychological trauma as the explanation for life's evils. Sometime horror writer Engstrom (Nightmare Flower, 1992, etc.) opts this time out for suspense and makes an avidly Hitchcockian discovery in the process—that miles of narrative can by gained in claustrophobic settings. The three female leads here—Elsie, Rebecca, and Tulie, all coeds at the University of Oregon—and the three male—Buck, Niles, and Songster, hobo neighbors and coworkers on the same housepainting crew—spend most of their time in cars. Elsie's bright idea is to get the girls dolled up in strumpety garb and descend on a cowboy bar, there to garner some extra cash with their feminine wiles. Rebecca, a Mormon, goes right along; but out of frustration Tulie, a recovering lesbian, abandons her two friends when Elsie's Camero stalls in a snowstorm. Enter the three stooges, who've decided to go camping in Buck's station wagon. Elsie and Rebecca continue on to the bar, while Tulie, in an effort to prove she's not a dyke, winds up staying with the hobo trio, even having tequila-soaked sex with the psychotic Songster. Things will get increasingly harrowing in Buck's car (the consensus is that the Songster killed a woman and disposed of her body) as Elsie, at the bar, unsuccessfully practices the world's oldest profession and Rebecca connects with a pimply cowhand—it's with him and his burly, rapist friend that Elsie and Rebecca end up. When Elsie shoots her assailant dead, the two girls flee back over the mountain, where they find Tulie in the throes of a violent struggle to keep three men from killing her before they kill each other. Lacing her story with retrospective vignettes of broken families and poor-as-dirt poverty, Engstrom tries to keep things swift and scary, but, even given the psychosocial background, none of the final tragedy really seems earned.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-385-31249-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Delta
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1995
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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