A wickedly funny send-up.
George W. Bush speaks from the mountaintop—or at least the helicopter pad—in Coe’s cutting political satire.
On his last day in office, the author’s fictional effigy of the 43rd president addresses an adoring throng of cronies, henchmen and monied interests as he waits to be choppered out into history. His farewell speech, rendered here in an inspired pastiche of Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet, is a celebration of heedless militarism, arrogant wealth, callow pleasure-seeking and smug entitlement, all expressed in a hilarious pseudo-scriptural mishmash of poetic aphorism and good-ole-boy swagger. Bush’s sermon revisits his administration’s triumphs from the Iraq war (“If you convene wars from your executive La-Z-boy, but your soul is really playing golf in Texas, then you set your fellow man dangling as a million leaves dangle without hope in the heart of autumn”) to corruption scandals (“Does the banyan too not give No Bid Contracts to the ants who drink its sap and guard its bark, and the monkeys who shelter upon its rungs and spread its seeds in their scat?”) to the AIG bailout (“For what is government but a credit card for the rich? And what good is a credit card that dawdles below its max?”). But Bush also discourses on matters of the heart and spirit, from marriage (“Buy her lavish diamonds…so she may pretend that she is loved to this degree before her squawking friends”) to charity (“Thus I say to you, treat the poor like nothing at all…saving your dollars for another lap dance in Dubai”) to mortality (“Keep your own personal ass safe, for your fear of death is both sensible and inborn, and your life is worth more than others.”) This is less a portrait of a real president than a scornful caricature of the Republican ruling elite, one that’s as cartoonish as the author’s amusing drawings of a puerile W frolicking in his flight harness. Coe shows us Bush in a funhouse mirror that distorts—but often reveals.
A wickedly funny send-up.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2010
ISBN: 978-1450260572
Page Count: 84
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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