If Flannery O—Connor had written the screenplay for Midnight Express, it might have turned out somewhat like this startling and remarkable debut novel—academic glam, international intrigue, and Christian redemption all stirred up in the same wok. —Going Abroad was the core motivating principle of my life.— Mei has always been looking for ways out. Born in Singapore, she moved to Holland with her family as a girl, then won a scholarship to study law in Britain. Now she’s back in Malaysia as a fledgling attorney, and one of her first cases turns out to be the greatest trial of her life—literally. Her English boyfriend Andy has been arrested for running a betting operation out of his flat, and under Singapore’s draconian penal code, he faces a lifetime in jail. It’s obvious that the real culprit is Loong Tay, Andy’s old Oxford chum, who brought him over to Singapore and set him up in the flat in the first place. Loong is a diplomat’s son who has spent most of his life getting into trouble and leaving other people to deal with the consequences, and he’s been heavily involved in Singapore’s gambling scene for some while. But is a Singapore court likely to believe the truth when it implicates the son of the ambassador to China? Mei knows better: —The good suffer, while the bad go on to live happy lives. End of story.— And Mei knows this from experience: specifically, the experience she had as a child at the hands of her father, whose perversion and cruelty could have killed her but instead somehow made her a Christian. Can Andy survive as well as she has? That depends on what you mean by a —happy ending.— Witty, hip, engrossing—and utterly astonishing both in breadth of feeling and depth of intelligence: one of the strangest and most original works of the year.
Pub Date: Jan. 26, 1999
ISBN: 0-89255-236-0
Page Count: 284
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1998
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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