No writer takes ideas as far or presents them so convincingly, from a spellbinding dramatization of a physical and ethical...
Another mind-boggling vision from the author of the demanding but immensely rewarding Diaspora (1998). Twenty millennia from now, matter and space can be shaped to order by “quantum graph” techniques deriving from the Sarumpaet rules; only the speed of light remains inviolate, so space travelers eventually become estranged from their origins. Murder is unknown; people are immortal and, until stirred by physical attraction, asexual, when they rapidly develop the requisite organs. But no other intelligent life exists and, lacking challenges, human society has grown vegetative. Physicist Cass's experimental “novo-vacuum,” expected to endure only for an instant, instead expands at half the speed of light, swallowing solar systems as it goes. Six hundred years later, investigators aboard a ship coasting just in front of the expanding boundary are split into two mutually hostile factions: Tchicaya and the Yielders wish simply to study the phenomenon; Mariama, Tchicaya's former lover and rival, and the other Preservationists intend to destroy the novo-vacuum using space-chewing constructs called Planck worms. The novo-vacuum, however, composed of Planck-scale “vendeks,” appears to be alive! Even more astonishing, somebody within seems to be signaling! The factions quickly agree on a moratorium. But the Preservationists have been infiltrated by “anachronauts,” refugees from the 23rd century who regard modern society as psychotic and are determined to destroy the novo-vacuum with its competing life-forms—and they launch virulent Planck worms before the Yielders can react. Still mutually suspicious, Tchicaya and Mariama join forces and enter the novo-vacuum, hoping to find intelligent beings and find a way to defeat the Planck worms from within.
No writer takes ideas as far or presents them so convincingly, from a spellbinding dramatization of a physical and ethical clash in a society that knows little of either up to an utterly brain-blasting exploration-explication of physics-as-biology.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-105093-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Eos/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2002
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
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