Irish to the gills, a festive delight, and fully aware of what it is—and what it isn’t.
Newspaper columns and a stage adaptation (The Brother) quilted out of O’Brien’s novels make for a merry little patchwork of literary pleasures from the late (d. 1966) comic master (At Swim-Two-Birds, 1939).
Jamie O’Neill (whose own 2002 masterpiece he titled At Swim, Two Boys) explains that in 1940, when London publishers roundly rejected The Third Policeman, O’Brien’s second novel, the author “turned to journalism” and, over the next 20 years, wrote a column for the Irish Times that, to judge by the 85 short selections here, was dedicated often to the construction of a shaggy-dog sort of tiny tale leading up to the most witty, appalling, groan-worthy, intricate, or inventive pun conceivable. O’Brien (writing as Myles na Gopaleen) often employed his pair of fictional friends, Keats and Chapman (who “met” in the Keats ode on Chapman’s Homer), putting them into any variety of situation needed to produce the desired result. Keats, hence, in “Stradivarius,” is a violinist whose dog, named Byrne, gets lost. Keats goes on practicing even so. Chapman, “looking in for an after-supper pipe,” is surprised at Keats’s “composure.” Asks Keats: “And why should I not fiddle . . . while Byrne roams?” The delicacy of the writing and delivery is all: synopsized thus, the reader’s groan will dominate, but along with the light-footed subtlety and pitch-perfect drollery of O’Brien’s setup, even the most awful spoonerism will delight rather than gag, whether “In a pique in Darien,” “Please Byrne when Red,” or “I’m afraid I put my food in it.” In the case of “The Brother,” the long monologue adapted by Eamon Morrissey, what steals the show is the voice of an Irish drinking man, who has his own wandering inventiveness, hyperbole, and fancy: and who, along with his never-seen brother, is in fact being “written,” by someone known only as “your man,” into stories and situations that—well, that are soulful, sad, absurd, hilarious at once, ending both in laughter and in death.
Irish to the gills, a festive delight, and fully aware of what it is—and what it isn’t.Pub Date: March 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-312-32907-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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