A meandering but often funny and entertaining picaresque about the Mormon faith.
Mormon missionaries encounter hard times and a Mephistophelian menace in von Osten’s (This Happy Life, 2013, etc.) raucous coming-of-age satire.
In 1967, with the Vietnam War raging, plenty of young Mormon men try to escape the draft by undertaking two-year missionary stints for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But John Gaumless, a Salt Lake City native whose high draft number makes him exempt from call-up, has genuinely spiritual motives, stoked by his high-minded girlfriend, Marylou. Alas, his time proselytizing in Northern Ireland gradually erodes his illusions about the church. The Irish people, Protestant and Catholic alike, respond to Mormon overtures with curses, hurled rocks and tossed chamber pots. The mission’s president is a feckless man who spends his time feeding his swans as his seething wife and scheming underlings plot petty power plays. Bored, lonely, cold and depressed, the other young missionaries transgress the Mormon strictures against alcohol and engage in back-stabbing rivalries and furtive gay trysts. John, a floundering innocent, finds his only friend in Orson Roundtower—a handsome, sardonic Brigham Young University basketball star who prefers Dostoevsky to the Book of Mormon and regards LDS doctrine with bemused contempt. (At one point, Roundtower ups his conversion numbers by bribing an Irish family to undergo Mormon baptism in exchange for bottles of orange Fanta.) John finds Roundtower to be an island of relaxed urbanity in a sea of hypocritical dogmatism, but as their relationship intensifies, he starts to wonder why villagers flee from his friend—and why so many missionaries keep dying in his vicinity. Von Osten’s sendup of Mormon doctrine, rituals and culture is detailed and cutting. Marylou’s antic letters to John, stuffed with Mormon piety and ditzy uplift—“When the tough get going, the going gets tough!”—are particularly hilarious. The book’s portrait of bedraggled teenage missionaries, feigning religious ardor as a coverup for self-interest and bureaucratic inertia, is well-observed throughout. The narrative does feel somewhat aimless, though, except when Roundtower takes center stage with his debonair charisma, rakish humor and unapologetic mischievousness. Before Roundtower’s villainy subsides, a bit disappointingly, into mere melodrama, he presents a compelling case for why deviltry remains such an appealing alternative to holiness.
A meandering but often funny and entertaining picaresque about the Mormon faith.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2014
ISBN: 978-1500668648
Page Count: 356
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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