A slow-paced, gay coming-of-age debut novel set in the working-class town of Pryor, an impoverished but colorful and spiritually rich corner of Oklahoma. Reed's title may strike some as a lousy pun, but the author links it, somewhat grimly, with an American small-town reality: It's the place where the parts of slaughtered cattle not sold as cuts of meat get shipped for ``rendering'' (i.e., transformation into salable items). Charlie Hope is 18, fatherless, and saddled with a fervently religious mother who's forever mythologizing Charlie's dead father. Luckily, Charlie also has a salt-of-the-earth grandfather, Chick, a crusty old sot whose bar is a local fixture and whose alcoholic expeditions with Charlie form an adventurous counterpoint to the boy's otherwise dreary existence. (Charlie's emerging homosexuality seems a minimal issue to him.) Charlie's discovery of Chick's dead body is the book's saddest, most starkly rendered moment. Enter Dewar, Charlie's first real lover, a terminal runaway from the Strang Home for Boys who steps in to fill the void in the narrative left by Chick's death. ``Once we had cracked the safe of our sexual attraction, we were surprisingly conservative in the divvying up and doling out of its illicit fortune,'' reports Charlie. The boys do some traveling; there's an odd, dreamy interlude that Charlie passes with a freakish local character known as the Turtle Man (because he carries turtle shells around in a sack, trying to sell them), and Dewar disappears. Along the way, Reed (by day a medical education coordinator in New York City) sustains his gentle, unpreachy characters on a steady diet of cigarettes and white-trash wisdom. His real strength lies in his effortless ability to wed dialogue with description, a particularly useful talent since his interest in plot seems limited. A near-perfect little tale, and a compelling alternative to the spate of gay epics that have lately inundated readers.
Pub Date: April 8, 1996
ISBN: 0-525-94102-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1996
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.
