Think Huckleberry Finn in hormonal overdrive, or Penrod with a perpetual erection. They won’t be assigning this one in...
You really can hear the hushed resonant voice of the genial host of NPR’s Prairie Home Companion reciting this latest episodic chronicle of growing up in rural Minnesota.
Keillor’s first novel in four years (following Wobegon Boy, 1997) is narrated by (obvious authorial surrogate) 14-year-old Gary, the timid yet intellectually adventurous son of a placid family who belong to the evangelical Christian Sanctified Brethren. Sanctified or not, Gary fantasizes energetically and guiltily about sex (hiding his borrowed copy of High School Orgies from the disapproving scrutiny of his deeply conservative Daddy—a worrywart of Herculean proportions—and annoyingly pious Oldest Sister). The narrative rambles about amiably, as Gary bonds affectionately with his doting, dotty maiden Aunt Eva (who may remind readers of Truman Capote’s immortal Cousin Sook), trespasses the bounds of decency with his hellion cousin Kate, works as a temporary sportswriter covering the woeful Lake Wobegon Whippets baseball team (who approach mediocrity, thanks to star pitcher Roger Guppy, Kate’s secret beau), and tentatively exercises his writing muscles further by concocting hilariously inchoate short stories (don’t miss the one about the deflowering of Eleanor of Aquitaine*). It’s a delightful comic romp, featuring characters who deserve to become legends—like Lake Wobegon’s own Bonnie and Clyde, criminal fugitives Ricky Guppy (Roger’s brother) and his girlfriend Dede, who versify their exploits for the newspapers (“To live in peace is our desire. / We love each other. Hold your fire”) and Whippets’ coach Ding Schoenecker (his policy on drinking in the dugout: “If you can’t remember how many strikes on you, you’ve had too much”). Gary dutifully records them all, while burning with numerous unslakeable lusts.
Think Huckleberry Finn in hormonal overdrive, or Penrod with a perpetual erection. They won’t be assigning this one in elementary schools, but adults of all ages should find Keillor’s refreshingly impudent Americana just about irresistible.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-670-03003-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
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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