A former torture expert decides to walk the circumference of the Earth from the comfort of his own backyard.
In a drier outing than one might expect from an authority on social satire, Nicholson (The London Complaint, 2016, etc.) explores the complicated consequences of a life spent in the business of torment. Our protagonist is Joe Johnson, a trained psychotherapist who has spent years in the service of “the Team,” a covert government agency that hired him to teach its operatives to resist torture. He’s recently resigned and, in the wake of a divorce from his wife, Carole, is adrift. Buying a small house a few hours north of London, Joe commits to walking 25 miles a day for 1,000 days to complete a circumnavigation of the planet, except that he’s not leaving his backyard. “I may not have been conspicuously, demonstrably happy, but I definitely wasn’t unhappy,” Joe says. “I was content with my life, taking pleasure in small things, and in the much larger thing of walking around the world.” But Joe’s backyard gets to be an increasingly crowded place with visits from nosy neighbors, a philosophical mailman, some local riff raff who start a trivial war with Joe, and a curious child. He finds solace in the company of a personal assistant, Miranda, an aspiring bartender who plies Joe with her experimental cocktails. Unfortunately, Joe’s unusual hobby attracts the attention of the local press and a would-be filmmaker, thrusting him into public view. For a man who has trespassed against so many souls, the past is never far behind, and the consequences of Joe’s actions soon come calling. It’s a strange book, not quite a thriller and yet oddly contemplative about the human condition, capturing the perpetual unease of a world seemingly forever at war with itself.
An existential revenge story offering a confession that doesn’t beg forgiveness.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-944700-36-2
Page Count: 218
Publisher: Unnamed Press
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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The years pass by at a fast and steamy clip in Blume’s latest adult novel (Wifey, not reviewed; Smart Women, 1984) as two friends find loyalties and affections tested as they grow into young women. In sixth grade, when Victoria Weaver is asked by new girl Caitlin Somers to spend the summer with her on Martha’s Vineyard, her life changes forever. Victoria, or more commonly Vix, lives in a small house; her brother has muscular dystrophy; her mother is unhappy, and money is scarce. Caitlin, on the other hand, lives part of the year with her wealthy mother Phoebe, who’s just moved to Albuquerque, and summers with her father Lamb, equally affluent, on the Vineyard. The story of how this casual invitation turns the two girls into what they call "Summer sisters" is prefaced with a prologue in which Vix is asked by Caitlin to be her matron of honor. The years in between are related in brief segments by numerous characters, but mostly by Vix. Caitlin, determined never to be ordinary, is always testing the limits, and in adolescence falls hard for Von, an older construction worker, while Vix falls for his friend Bru. Blume knows the way kids and teens speak, but her two female leads are less credible as they reach adulthood. After high school, Caitlin travels the world and can’t understand why Vix, by now at Harvard on a scholarship and determined to have a better life than her mother has had, won’t drop out and join her. Though the wedding briefly revives Vix’s old feelings for Bru, whom Caitlin is marrying, Vix is soon in love with Gus, another old summer friend, and a more compatible match. But Caitlin, whose own demons have been hinted at, will not be so lucky. The dark and light sides of friendship breathlessly explored in a novel best saved for summer beachside reading.
Pub Date: May 8, 1998
ISBN: 0-385-32405-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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