Kemske (Lifetime Employment—not reviewed) mines the man- against-machine lode worked by Karel Capek, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and lesser-knowns in a see-through morality tale more notable for set-piece insights than narrative finesse or impact. Though he's head of the near-future consulting firm Information Accuracy, Inc., Donald F. Jones abhors face-to-face communication with subordinates who seem never to understand his objectives and are reluctant to take responsibility for their own decisions. Accordingly, he introduces a computer network whose adaptive, interactive software functions as a perfect supervisor. Having minimized direct human contacts in house and out, the goal- oriented CEO soon presides over a lucrative commercial establishment whose efficiency amazes and gratifies him. For certain IAI underlings, however, the price of progress comes high. Linda Brainwright, the bright, beautiful specialist Jones briefly bedded, is ultimately rejected by the seemingly omniscient feedback system she programmed. The proximate cause of her downfall is a one-night stand with Arthur, a lower-echelon project coordinator who's begun to buckle under the strain of reporting to a virtual boss that unpredictably dispenses praise, blame, and conflicting job assignments through a work-station terminal. That he almost immediately loses control of the self-ordering system does not disturb Jones, whose against-the-touchy-feely-grain goal is an enterprise free of such frictional irritants as personal relationships. Kemske has a state-of-the-art grasp of technology's more ominous implications in the brave new world of business, and his stereotypical characters frequently offer challenging observations (``Fascism, manipulation, management, I can't make these fine semantic distinctions''). But he's not a particularly gifted storyteller, and his cautionary tale simply comes to a dead end rather than an illuminating conclusion.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-945774-22-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1993
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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
