Gibson has created a larger-than-life character in Harry Christmas—who is many things but not Santa Claus, thank you very...
This book is part thriller, part farce, part Don Quixote, and has plenty of excellent writing.
Harry Christmas is drunk and on the run. He intends to bury a book of poetry on the beach in his late wife’s homeland of Venezuela as a loving last act for his Emily. But he's also running from his fiancee's deranged stepson, since he just ripped off the money she deposited in a joint bank account for their future life together. Not surprisingly, he's finally running from himself. Gibson has created an antihero of significant proportions: 58 years old, a quick wit and intellect addled by booze, bloated and raging against The Rot—“that corroding plasma of infantilisation”—which translates to anything and everything Harry sees wrong with the world. He is, in fact, running on empty. After skipping out of an elegant Caracas hotel, he takes up with Judith Lamb, an eccentric Englishwoman who sculpts penises, lying his way into her home and her bed by posing as the British author Harry Strong, whom she adores. Life with Judith is like paradise for Harry, and he even manages a running battle with her suspicious daughter, who shows up unexpectedly, but he has to go on the run again when William Slade, the maniacal avenger, appears hot on his trail. As Harry runs, bad things happen to people who trust his lies, and as he finds his wife’s hometown and falls in love with a magnificent character named Lola Rosa, disaster looms again. Judith describes the Harry she knows as “a pompous old sod but he’s got a good heart.” Her daughter pictures him as “a selfish, self-satisfied, wholly unlikable wanker.” Lola Rosa sums up a third perspective: "Aloe Vera is a special plant. If you have enemies, if someone hate you, the Aloe Vera absorb the bad energy. Since you come these two [plants] have died.” Take your pick of Harry Christmas.
Gibson has created a larger-than-life character in Harry Christmas—who is many things but not Santa Claus, thank you very much.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-63450-609-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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