An often engaging novel of big ideas but lacking detailed context to fully support them.
Debut author Baker presents a complicated dialogue between self-improvement and self-acceptance in this novel.
Despite being a daydreamer, teenager Jeremiah feels trapped within himself. Throughout high school, he’s tried to become part of the in-crowd and one of what he calls the “Donnigan Boys,” to no avail. In his difficult, single-minded quest for self-improvement, Jeremiah finds little solace, except in the school counselor, Tom, who has had a profound impact on Jeremiah’s outlook. But it’s Tom’s use of Myers-Briggs personality typing that brings Jeremiah to the threshold of something more. The story begins as Jeremiah nears the end of his high school career, where he’s making progress, beginning to ignore people who’ve done nothing to earn his admiration. He also becomes closer to Alicia, a fellow outcast and his one true friend. This storytelling choice allows the book to get to the meat of the plot immediately, as Tom introduces a still-unsatisfied Jeremiah to the Auralites; they run a commune of sorts and prize introspection above all else, studying their own “auras” and actively working to change themselves. However, Jeremiah seems to be arriving at a relatively healthy state of mind before he decides to spend the summer with the Auralites, which undermines the emotional stakes of his journey for readers—muddling his hard-won self-acceptance with self-improvement dogma. The epithet Donnigan Boys is presented as a term in common usage, but it remains unexplained for a substantial portion of the novel, which seems needlessly obtuse; it turns out that it’s derived from a fictional play in which the Donnigan family represents an exclusive clique. As the tone shifts between character-driven mystery, satire, and polemic, readers may find it hard to pin down exactly when the novel is supposed to take place. As a result, it’s difficult to become fully immersed in the story, as it feels a few steps removed from reality. Ultimately, though, Baker offers solid prose and strong characterization, and the overall plot is satisfying, particularly when Jeremiah begins to learn more about Tom’s past and the reasons behind his departure from the Auralites.
An often engaging novel of big ideas but lacking detailed context to fully support them.Pub Date: March 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73280-651-1
Page Count: 348
Publisher: Eagle Cliff Press LLC
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
