Brilliant and brutal; a thrilling story surrounding complex, nuanced considerations of nihilism, optimism, and our own...
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Gapinski’s (Messiah Tortoise, 2018) surrealist novella doles out dark comedy, visceral detail, and deft commentary in equal measure.
Our main character’s bus commute takes her between work and a home life she’d rather not discuss, accompanied by the same sad, stained, frequently off-putting fellow passengers. When the bus’s marquee reads “Out of Service,” she finds herself taken not to her menial job behind a deli butcher’s counter but a barren shantytown in a desert wilderness. Despite seemingly hopeless circumstances, she remains determined to leave this place even as her butchery skills earn her a certain cachet in a town that survives on rat meat, beetles, and the dead. Her refusal to join one of the town’s cultlike factions makes her an object of fascination. In a world where the bus driver is armed and dangerous and only drops off new arrivals or drives pickups in a circle, there’s something heroic in her persistence as well as that of the townsfolk. Their lives are ugly, crude, and filthy, but they’ve still carved a society out of the will to survive and from every scrap that comes in on the bus, like using makeup as an accelerant for a fire barrel. Gapinski’s matter-of-fact prose works perfectly here, the straight-faced descriptions of death and cannibalism lending a comic tinge to the macabre proceedings: “Bus-Driver opens the door and pushes out the body. It’s got a terrible smell, like skunk and shit mixed with a hint of blood.” The story only heightens this dissonance with naturalistic dialogue, forcing readers to question what “normal” is when credit cards and other modern symbols of power and prosperity lose their meanings. Finally, for all the gore and horror, this isn’t The Road or Mad Max or any such story of the barbaric. The threatening aspects of the denizens of Out of Service seemingly stem from their extreme poverty and the narrator’s refusal to participate in their social order, not from any malice. Thus the novella poses questions of why these people have been thrust into these hellish circumstances, how they can escape them, and ultimately how different their lives really are from our own.
Brilliant and brutal; a thrilling story surrounding complex, nuanced considerations of nihilism, optimism, and our own existential reality.Pub Date: May 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9988976-0-8
Page Count: 134
Publisher: Etchings Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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The years pass by at a fast and steamy clip in Blume’s latest adult novel (Wifey, not reviewed; Smart Women, 1984) as two friends find loyalties and affections tested as they grow into young women. In sixth grade, when Victoria Weaver is asked by new girl Caitlin Somers to spend the summer with her on Martha’s Vineyard, her life changes forever. Victoria, or more commonly Vix, lives in a small house; her brother has muscular dystrophy; her mother is unhappy, and money is scarce. Caitlin, on the other hand, lives part of the year with her wealthy mother Phoebe, who’s just moved to Albuquerque, and summers with her father Lamb, equally affluent, on the Vineyard. The story of how this casual invitation turns the two girls into what they call "Summer sisters" is prefaced with a prologue in which Vix is asked by Caitlin to be her matron of honor. The years in between are related in brief segments by numerous characters, but mostly by Vix. Caitlin, determined never to be ordinary, is always testing the limits, and in adolescence falls hard for Von, an older construction worker, while Vix falls for his friend Bru. Blume knows the way kids and teens speak, but her two female leads are less credible as they reach adulthood. After high school, Caitlin travels the world and can’t understand why Vix, by now at Harvard on a scholarship and determined to have a better life than her mother has had, won’t drop out and join her. Though the wedding briefly revives Vix’s old feelings for Bru, whom Caitlin is marrying, Vix is soon in love with Gus, another old summer friend, and a more compatible match. But Caitlin, whose own demons have been hinted at, will not be so lucky. The dark and light sides of friendship breathlessly explored in a novel best saved for summer beachside reading.
Pub Date: May 8, 1998
ISBN: 0-385-32405-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
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The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
19
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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. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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