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THE BOOK OF DEAD AUTHORS

Cheer for every author who didn’t make the Modern Library’s Top 100, or even a single publisher’s acceptance pile: somebody has declared open season on Britain’s most undeservedly successful novelists. Amazonia Skreen doesn’t see why her own heartfelt fictional outpourings should have been rejected by the same publishers who trumpeted the rubbish of hacks like Adam Appleton, that delicate aesthete who also ghostwrote pornography on the side, or of Mick Roper, the pop singer who probably couldn’t even read the best-selling books issued under his name. Aided by her brawny, monosyllabic sidekick Tup Maul (whose hopeful response to each successful homicide is “Love now?”), she stages elaborately moralizing death scenes for Adam, Mick, and a bevy of other literary types: the self-merchandising success-story whose books are sold at his own coffeeshops; the half-anonymous co-dependent pair Amazonia intends to bring even closer in death; the crypto-fascist ranter of the roman-Ö-clef—all of them so excruciatingly familiar that it’s a pleasure to see the whole lot get their sanguinary comeuppance, especially at the hands (etc.) of the exotic and uninhibited Amazonia. The conceit is so appealing (the Modern Library meets House of Wax, with Sharon Stone in the Vincent Price role), and newcomer Rees is so obviously having a good time, that it seems both stuffy and reckless to complain that the plot device he’s chosen to add momentum and suspense to his series of Dantesque set-pieces(bad-hat Jack Jackson takes over the life of his twin brother, successful author David Jackson, when David succumbs to a miscalculated bout of erotic autoasphyxia, thereby unwittingly placing himself in all the peril David escaped by his timely demise) is so much less interesting than Amazonia’s gleefully lethal swipes at the literary establishment that you can hardly wait for the avenger to add this poseur’s scalp to her collection. An upscale black-comic equivalent of beach reading.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1998

ISBN: 0-7472-5721-3

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Headline

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1998

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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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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

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

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