Religion and UFOs are fodder for an unconvincing jeremiad by Pulitzer Prizewinning syndicated columnist Anderson (The Japan Conspiracy, 1993, etc.). The human race has been deemed a failure by its intergalactic peers. One alien visits Washington, D.C., in 1999, hoping to warn the US President that the planet will soon be ``scrubbed'' of all sentient beings. After he is turned away from the White House, a gang member nicknamed Ghost knocks him out, steals his space suit and the rock he carries, and leaves him for dead. Heiress Serena Blake finds the alien with the homeless while doing volunteer work on the mall and, feeling an unexplainable affinity for this odd-looking man, names him Victor and takes him home. Ghost, hoping to get more alien devices (the ones he has have given him extraordinary persuasive powers), searches for him. Victor is also sought by Harry Lauter, a soap-box preacher who knows that the Dead Sea Scrolls predict alien visitation, and by a government agency so secret that it is unnamed. The standard MO of the agency is to infiltrate tabloids with absurd UFO stories so that actual abductees will come forward with their stories, but now it watches Harry, chases Ghost, and abducts everyone who has come in contact with Victor. They all learn of Victor's whereabouts when, through various contrivances, they spot Serena and Victor's photo in the society pages. Susan Hill, a Washington Times intern, finds Serena and Victor and enlists the help of her boss, syndicated columnist Mick Aaronson. The human race could be redeemed—if only the heroes can outwit vindictive government agents and urban youths. Victor convinces Mick to write columns that will rekindle the American spirit because, after all, if America is saved, the world is saved. A cautinary tale that adds nothing edifying to the trendy, sensationalist subject of UFOs except Anderson's own reductive views on contemporary societal ills.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-312-85401-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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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