A robust and often hilarious, if somewhat slow-paced, bildungsroman.
Tooley’s comic debut novel follows the anarchic misadventures of a gang of boys coming-of-age in Arizona’s Sonora Desert in the late 1960s.
Twelve-year-old narrator Johnny Caruso and his raucous friends make up the Seward School Bombers, or “the SBB.” Its main missions are to punish self-righteous tattletales, keep girls in their place, and generally buck the system. The novel’s episodic first half establishes the motley crew’s ethos as they glide from one catastrophic prank to the next without any consequences. In a series of exploits worthy of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, the boys detonate explosives at the home of a school nuisance, make tennis-ball bazookas out of tin cans, confront a tough rival gang known as The Losers, and crash a meeting of the Pueblo Junior Debutantes and Young Gentleman’s Academy to devastating effect. The novel gets much-needed narrative traction when the boys take up a new hobby: ghost hunting at the historic, dilapidated Mansfield Place. But as the boys get closer to obtaining evidence of old Mr. Mansfield’s apparition, Johnny’s domestic life intrudes. His younger sister, Gracie, insists on tagging along, resulting in an emergency meeting of the SBB’s disciplinary council. With Johnny’s fealty to the gang in question, the stakes become even higher to solve the mystery. When the gang members discover a person in distress, it offers them a chance for redemption; they all consider their moral beliefs, and the extent to which they’re willing to take risks when it matters most. Johnny’s narrative voice is generally engaging and folksy. At times, though, it seems disingenuous, as when Johnny describes a savant: “This one poor fella, who hardly knew where the heck he was, could listen to a Baytoevan conchairtoe just once, and then, lickety-split, play the whole thing.” Such passages seem at odds with the author’s beautifully lyrical, and pointedly mature, descriptions of Arizona landscape (“The Palo Verdes were practically dripping in bright yellow blossoms that were startling against the mostly gray surroundings”).
A robust and often hilarious, if somewhat slow-paced, bildungsroman.Pub Date: May 18, 2013
ISBN: 978-1481885867
Page Count: 422
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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