An ambitious and insightful new novel in which a dog is your co-pilot.
Debut novelist MacDonnell offers discussions of politics, religion, philosophy, and science—all from a dog’s-eye view.
Have you ever looked into your dog’s face and seen a flash of recognition—a canny glance that makes you wonder if Sparky knows a lot more than he’ll ever let on? MacDonnell apparently has, and the result is this deeply innovative new volume, which plumbs the depths of canine psychology. The main character is Eros, a newborn pup learning to make his way in the wide world. His mother and first mentor is Skylark, or “Shyla,” as her human owners know her. She brings Eros (and readers) up to speed on some basic truths about their world: Dogs are smarter and more perceptive than humans; they communicate via telepathy; and they take care of people, not the other way around. Eros is a preternaturally reflective young dog, and his questions quickly outstrip his mother’s teachings, sending him on an intellectual journey through the realms of metaphysics, psychology, faith, and a host of other topics. Overall, MacDonnell’s book is daring, original, and cheeky. She’s as quick with a joke as she is with a philosophical maxim, and her novel is a dexterous mix of humor and deep reflection. The only real weakness is that it all gets a bit repetitive from time to time. Take, for example, the first lines of the second, third, and fourth chapters: “Three days of eating, sleeping, and not a lot of thinking went by”; “These early days passed quickly. Eros slept a lot, ate a lot, and slept some more”; and “The next few days were just a lot of feeding and sleeping.” A more streamlined product would have been even more enjoyable, but these small structural issues don’t dampen the fun—or the fulfillment—that the book delivers.
An ambitious and insightful new novel in which a dog is your co-pilot.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5320-5913-1
Page Count: 212
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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