At times laugh-out-loud funny, occasionally just weird for the sake of weird, but consistently entertaining.
A drug trial participant blogs about his experiences on an experimental medication and questions whether the strangeness in his life is a side-effect or just weirdness as usual.
As a test subject in an experimental drug trial, Gomez Porter is asked to a keep a blog to chronicle any strange experiences, an exercise that quickly alerts him to just how many odd things seem to be happening around him. He soon finds himself wrapped up in a possible murder mystery, stalking a stalker for a woman he thinks he loves (though it might just be the drugs), while his life and the characters in it get ever more absurd—and increasingly dangerous. Parke’s debut novel melds screwball comedy, hipster-style irony and an old-fashioned unreliable narrator into a quirky whodunit that challenges our perceptions about how we think and interact with the world around us. The blog-style entries are unique, providing a firsthand view of events from Gomez’s perspective, a perspective that even the character himself actively joins the reader in doubting. When Gomez goes so far as to admit he edits his posts, we’re left to wonder what got cut, what he isn’t telling us and why, if he is cutting things, he still records his more embarrassing, frightening or unflattering moments. These layers of ambiguity, combined with the novel’s wit and some of its more subtle humor (often overshadowed by its bigger laughs), give the book the distinction of being a work most will want to revisit. The most notable shortcoming is the ending; it isn’t hugely satisfying, and the tone doesn’t fit with the rest of the book. But this is largely forgivable as the real charm of the novel is in the humor of its journey rather than its surprisingly solemn destination.
At times laugh-out-loud funny, occasionally just weird for the sake of weird, but consistently entertaining.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2011
ISBN: 978-1432752484
Page Count: 189
Publisher: Outskirts
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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
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