An engrossing rock novel about a complicated antihero.
Gebien concludes her trilogy about the journey of a washed-up rock star in this novel.
Damen Warner, the frontman for the band OBNXS, is back in his final story about trying to make it as a rock star. Throughout the novel, numerous obstacles are put in Damen’s way: his grandmother’s will, a custody battle, pit bulls, viral videos, and more. He has fallen into a deep alcoholic depression: Damen “looked like ten pounds of shit in a five-pound bag. Thirty years old. Too tall, too thin, too angry, too mean.” Damen’s relationships with his girlfriend, Melody, and her daughter, Vico, are in trouble: Melody’s ex, the “Baby Daddy,” wants custody of their daughter, and Damen ends up in the middle of the conflict. Additionally, Melody is meeting with her former clients from a strip club for extra money, which makes Damen uncomfortable. Then Damen runs into Evangeline, a girl he met on the road, a social media–savvy evangelical Christian willing to help the band with their image—for a fee. She arranges protests against OBNXS to gin up publicity, generating sufficient interest to allow the band to continue working on their album. Though Damen finds it easy to create the image that the internet demands, he drifts further away from who he is as an artist (“As much as I wanted to believe my career was rallying due to the overwhelming magnetism of my musical genius, the truth was most of my notoriety now came from videos of me doing stupid shit on the internet, including such hit singles as “Arrested Naked” (feat. TSA), “That Guy Who Kicked Over A Piano,” and “Strip Club Riot”).
The author is able to evoke raw emotions with a depth of sincerity (and a bit of embarrassment) through her cast of quirky characters. Damen has moments of tenderness with Vico balanced by his characteristic raw, raunchy humor and distinct voice. The narrative is paced well, moving quickly from one episode to the next. Gebien’s vivid descriptions transport readers into each scene and expose Damen’s naked feelings—as he struggles with the urge to drink one night, he leaves Melody in bed and goes to the kitchen, where he sees that “the abandoned chilis still lay on the cutting board like small, shriveled, scorched hearts. [He] knew how they felt.” These moments of revelation help make Damen an empathetic character. The sequences in which the band collaborates and riffs are strengths of the novel, allowing the reader to see more of Damen’s artistic process. Describing the album the band is working to complete, Damen notes that the “range of new sounds we planned to include was a lot wider than any of our previous work, slaloming wildly from hard rock and metal to dark country to absurd pop to achingly earnest to melodic impressionism.” Or, as Mungo Gordon, the band’s producer, sums it up, “chaotic,” a word that could also describe the feel of the novel—though it’s chaotic in a purposeful way, like OBNXS’ music.
An engrossing rock novel about a complicated antihero.Pub Date: April 25, 2023
ISBN: 9798988160502
Page Count: 436
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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