A book for insatiate lovers of heavy, religious, action-packed fiction.
A religious epic about the ultimate battle between good and evil.
At turns techno-thriller, horror novel, heroic fantasy and Old Testament tome, the central novelty is The Warrior of God’s clever conversion of biblical entities into modern superheroes and villains. Recasting these familiar canonical angels and demons, the novel serves up a Special Forces version of Gabriel and a pitiless advocate of the apocalypse in Baal. Awakened in the lands formerly known as Babylonia, Baal’s millennial slumber is disturbed during a well-drilling operation in Iraq. Indeed, the novel’s entire political backdrop is unapologetically topical. Feeding on the fears of those unfortunate enough to approach, Baal finally awakens from his millennial slumber and assiduously begins his annihilation of all that is good, usually by invading the minds of any mortal he chooses. Meanwhile, the high-tech descendants of the Oracle of Delphi, led by the indefatigable Walter, locate Gabriel in an ancient sarcophagus and transport his atrophied body back to Chicago. Oracle exists to assist Gabriel’s rehabilitation, but he’s a bit grumpy from a few thousand years of sleep and far from the familiar winged avatar of god. He quickly recovers and masters several modern martial arts–culminating in a death match against 32 professional killers recruited to test his new skills. Gabriel conquers, all while being brought up-to-date by a team of obnoxious humans. Walter, the brilliant, Twinkie-loving, reluctant scientist hero, succeeds wonderfully as counterpoint and light comic relief throughout the novel. He, as much of humanity, is an endless exasperation for Gabriel. Expletives abound in this Torah-sized tome, and though it relies a bit too heavily upon these lexical choices for eliciting emotion, the book’s depth, imaginative revisions and engaging characters will move readers. The pulsing plot spans the globe and solidly incorporates the threat of nuclear annihilation into the broader cosmic struggle between good and evil. It’s eschatology on all fronts–metaphysical and political. As with most novels of tremendous breadth, there are some characters who are easily forgotten and some subplots less than germane. However, there is little room for a reader’s lamentation after the brutal endgame played by Gabriel and Baal in the novel’s denouement, and Walter’s final metamorphosis is an ironic image that satisfies in the best, unexpected way.
A book for insatiate lovers of heavy, religious, action-packed fiction.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4392-4990-1
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
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
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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