From first-time author Hawes, one of the most endearingly caustic—yet still deftly sincere—novels to come out of Britain since Martin Amis's The Rachel Papers. It's been a while since the wildly self-conscious and cynical musings of that novel's narrator lit up literary London. Recent English tastes in fiction have tended toward reports of low-life travails smattered with references to American pop culture, and Hawes's debut is no exception: His sliding-from-the-middle class, twentyish slackers are marking time in the lower depths. The narrator, a 28-year-old former heroin-user living in a shed in his sister's backyard, has practically no means of achieving his drastically limited ambition to own a house with tall windows and a garden. So, while working a temp job that puts him inside a private bank, he naturally concocts a master plan to heist a cool million. And what a plan it is. Lacing together an unshaven femme fatale, a noble bruiser, and the IRA, among other ingredients, he calmly and deliberately turns to profitable crime. Meanwhile, what makes the book vastly more entertaining than the Coupland/Tarrentino clone it might have been is Hawes's strategy of having his narrator filter every nuance of the story through his hilarious personal perspective. Not surprisingly, the boy's a romantic at heart, and it soon becomes clear that he's really doing it all for girlfriend Suzy, a woman whose primary passion in life is driving with the wind in her hair. With running commentary along the way on everything from gay lifestyles to the Apocalypse to the glories of smoking, the bank job comes together, culminating in two conclusive chapters of wonderfully gleeful chaos. Hawes has leapt right past the callow grousings of Self, Welsh, and Fischer into a comic league all his own. Good to the last drop.
Pub Date: March 4, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-44225-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1996
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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