Smart, funny and eager to fly its freak flag.
A Pynchon-esque menagerie of California surfers, cops, thugs and dot-com workers converge in a comic anti-noir.
In his debut novel, Kang, a journalist and editor at the online magazine Grantland, does some serious musing on gentrification and racism (particularly toward Asians), but the storyline and overall tone are satirical. Set in present-day San Francisco, the story runs on two alternating tracks, following two lead characters toward an inevitable confrontation. Philip Kim is a recent MFA graduate who's stuck working on a website counseling recently dumped men, and Sid Finch is a homicide cop who, between surf breaks at Ocean Beach, is investigating the murder of Dolores, a neighbor of Philip’s. Connecting the two is an organization called Being Abundance, a hyper-PC group of activists targeting the city’s leading online pornographer and online culture in general. Kang sends up the Bay Area's moralizing atmosphere along with its inherent weirdness, but he also parlays the setup into some surprisingly affecting observations: Philip’s budding relationship with a gorgeous neighbor sparks incisive passages on San Francisco’s tense mix of races and cultures, and he has plenty of insights on hip-hop, social media and Cho Seung-Hui, the Virginia Tech mass murderer. Finch, in turn, gives the story a hard-boiled, Hammett-esque feel, with sharp takes of the city’s smut culture and surfer dudes. (San Francisco retro-rock musician and surfer Chris Isaak has a brief, funny cameo.) The structure of this novel is loose to the point of near-collapse—at times it feels like it’s held together with Simpsons references and easy digs at West Coast liberals, while the closing pages satirize thriller climaxes in particular and narrative arcs in general. But Kang mostly earns the right to his metafictional games, capturing the sense of disconnection of a young minority in the city.
Smart, funny and eager to fly its freak flag.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-95388-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
Pevear's informative introduction and numerous helpful explanatory notes help make this the essential Anna Karenina.
The husband-and-wife team who have given us refreshing English versions of Dostoevsky, Gogol, and Chekhov now present their lucid translation of Tolstoy's panoramic tale of adultery and society: a masterwork that may well be the greatest realistic novel ever written. It's a beautifully structured fiction, which contrasts the aristocratic world of two prominent families with the ideal utopian one dreamed by earnest Konstantin Levin (a virtual self-portrait). The characters of the enchanting Anna (a descendant of Flaubert's Emma Bovary and Fontane's Effi Briest, and forerunner of countless later literary heroines), the lover (Vronsky) who proves worthy of her indiscretion, her bloodless husband Karenin and ingenuous epicurean brother Stiva, among many others, are quite literally unforgettable. Perhaps the greatest virtue of this splendid translation is the skill with which it distinguishes the accents of Anna's romantic egoism from the spare narrative clarity with which a vast spectrum of Russian life is vividly portrayed.
Pevear's informative introduction and numerous helpful explanatory notes help make this the essential Anna Karenina.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-670-89478-8
Page Count: 864
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
PERSPECTIVES
A disappointingly bland follow-up to a stellar story collection.
A first novel from Pulitzer-winner Lahiri (stories: Interpreter of Maladies, 1999) focuses on the divide between Indian immigrants and their Americanized children.
The action takes place in and around Boston and New York between 1968 and 2000. As it begins, Ashoke Ganguli and his pregnant young wife Ashima are living in Cambridge while he does research at MIT. Their marriage was arranged in Calcutta: no problem. What is a problem is naming their son. Years before in India, a book by Gogol had saved Ashoke’s life in a train wreck, so he wants to name the boy Gogol. The matter becomes contentious and is hashed out at tedious length. Gogol grows to hate his name, and at 18 the Beatles-loving Yale freshman changes it officially to Nikhil. His father is now a professor outside Boston; his parents socialize exclusively with other middle-class Bengalis. The outward-looking Gogol, however, mixes easily with non-Indian Americans like his first girlfriend Ruth, another Yalie. Though Lahiri writes with painstaking care, her dry synoptic style fails to capture the quirkiness of relationships. Many scenes cry out for dialogue that would enable her characters to cut loose from a buttoned-down world in which much is documented but little revealed. After an unspecified quarrel, Ruth exits. Gogol goes to work as an architect in New York and meets Maxine, a book editor who seems his perfect match. Then his father dies unexpectedly—the kind of death that fills in for lack of plot—and he breaks up with Maxine, who like Ruth departs after a reported altercation (nothing verbatim). Girlfriend number three is an ultrasophisticated Indian academic with as little interest in Bengali culture as Gogol; these kindred spirits marry, but the restless Moushumi proves unfaithful. The ending finds the namesake alone, about to read the Russian Gogol for the first time.
A disappointingly bland follow-up to a stellar story collection.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2003
ISBN: 0-395-92721-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2003
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