Mulcahy is often clever and funny. But he never fleshes out any of his conceits, as if they weren't worth the bother....
Short, manic, experimental first novel from the author of the story collection Out of Work (1993).
``All this talk—this language—what is it but air?'' asks Wolf, a character who seems to be loosely modeled after Hamlet, and whose conceit informs every compressed, disjointed scene of Mulcahy's underdeveloped tale. What there is of a story begins with Wayne, a drifter who appeals to his brother, Bob, an obsessive physician, to take him in while he looks for work. Wayne does find work as a clerk in a gun shop; his brother dies. Wolf then emerges as the major character, using his father's assets to buy the gun store and then turning it, overnight, into a chain of franchises; meanwhile, Wayne marries his sister-in-law, Colleen. Colleen, given to long, nostalgic soliloquies that are like parodies of remembrances in other novels, is the most nearly convincing character here, but even so it's impossible to tell what motivates her. There are other walk-on figures: two prostitutes, a performing dog named Sponge Boy, and an ex-cowboy, Bill. Bill tells a story that is, in part, quite ingenious: A modern cowboy, seasoned by the outdoor life, grimly saddles up to chase rustlers who then disappear in a helicopter. He tracks the helicopter, follows a truck that leads to a slaughterhouse, follows the meat to a grocery. But after this, the story, which could have been a marvelous commentary on how corporate technology renders older, simpler values meaningless, fizzles into nothing—into the ``air'' of postmodernism. Shortly, Wolf's strange financial empire collapses and his mother absconds with what's left of her husband's fortune. Wolf handcuffs Wayne, sets fire to his house, and leaves too, hoping to collect on Wayne's life insurance.
Mulcahy is often clever and funny. But he never fleshes out any of his conceits, as if they weren't worth the bother. Readers will concur.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 1996
ISBN: 1-888105-13-5
Page Count: 160
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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