A biting satire peppered with harsh truths about university politics and academic shenanigans.
When a fictional university falls out of the Top 25 in a national magazine ranking, hysteria erupts on campus.
In this debut novel, Jones constructs Ty McTavish as a measured voice of reason in a sea of egomaniacs, sycophants and blowhards. McTavish, an African-American biophysics professor recently hired as the dean of arts and sciences at SNAF-U (“Small but National, Aspiring to be Famous University”), is welcomed by several colleagues who awkwardly assure him that race was not a factor in his selection. Just as he begins to adjust to his new surroundings, SNAF-U’s banishment from the elite grouping occurs, a calamity that spurs Robert Sligh, the unctuous university president, to rally the troops in hopes of overcoming this latest challenge: “We have endured the Great Depression, two World Wars, and the loss of Division I football.” Language is often stretched to its limits in academia, and here, the author is at his best, as the parodic text bursts with linguistic wordplay, from names (Olan Azkizur) and acronyms (NONSENSE) to departments (Statistical Theology) and ranking criteria (Tuitional Aggrandizement Originality). One character becomes so caught up in academic jargon that she makes no sense, sanctimoniously invoking “this epoch of interdisciplanaritiness and multiculturalment.” Despite this gleeful element, however, readers may notice rough patches in the narrative structure and pacing. For instance, Jones introduces the voracious, irresistible Jamais Dimanche quite late in the book, though she plays an integral role in the plan to return SNAF-U to its place in the Top 25 via distortion and subterfuge. The book also relies a bit too heavily on the epilogue to tie up loose narrative threads. While Jones focuses on questionable ethics within the administration, he also addresses many other issues plaguing postsecondary education, including institutionalized racism, grade inflation, and fraternization between faculty members and students. For inspiration, perhaps the author drew upon firsthand observations from his long career in university education, research and administration.
A biting satire peppered with harsh truths about university politics and academic shenanigans.Pub Date: April 23, 2013
ISBN: 978-1483619552
Page Count: 254
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2014
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
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.
Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.
Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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