Cady (Inagehi, 1994, etc.) lampoons his Puget Sound stomping ground in this loopy, somewhat loose-limbed eighth novel: a saga of good and evil battling for the souls of a Washington tourist town trapped in its past. The Victorian age lives on with a vengeance in smug Point Vestal, aided by the presence of countless ghosts of former inhabitants engaging in regular reenactments of their lives and violent ends. But one day in 1974 that pattern is broken and a new one installed, a process that begins when Joel-Andrew, a defrocked Episcopalian priest full of the Lord's power, comes to town with his dancing cat, Obed. Joel-Andrew unwittingly brings with him Point Vestal's one truly bad apple, August Starlinga thoroughly evil businessman originally committed to an asylum in 1893 after being discovered dancing with the corpse of a woman he killed. Starling returns without having aged and quickly adjusts to the new century, scheming to turn the town into a macabre tourist-trap by promoting it as the place for a last sin-filled fling before death, using this idea as a cover for a massive drug-smuggling operation. His sinister machinations are opposed by Joel-Andrew, various benign spirits living and dead, and Kune, a homeless ex-physician from Seattle who fell apart after being unable to save his dying wife. The confrontations finally culminate in a rigged resurrection scene complete with angels, monster spiders, a Chinese dragon, and hell-born darkness dispelled by celestial light. Joel-Andrew emerges victorious but is stoned for his trouble by citizens mourning lost revenue, prompting a new curse on the town that keeps anyone from aging or dying until they all atone. Overused time tricks and Stephen Kinglike flashy horror effects can't save this one. The lively writing and good insight into the human condition barely mask a ragged, too-familiar tale.
Pub Date: Nov. 14, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-13574-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1995
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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