A curiously discordant and inchoate first novel set in Los Angeles and environs, and focussed on a thinly characterized young woman in pursuit of (and fleeing from) a gaggle of southern California grotesques, as well as her own recent past. Having drifted cross-country after her mother's death, Jill finds herself working at the Bitter Muse Bookstore. A passing dwarf who needs quick cash sells her a signed Jack London first edition, but returns soon thereafter, accompanied by a menacing companion, to demand it back. Alas, Jill has already sold the volume to Timmy, a bookseller acquaintance and former child movie star who lives along the Venice Beach canals surrounded by pet ducks, and who has inconveniently disappeared. The whimsy thickens as Jill's efforts to reclaim the fugitive book lead her to the Las Vegas casinos, a bit role in a film being shot by famed actor-director John Malcome, encounters with both disguised movie extras and real cops, and a climactic standoff that skillfully mimics the overexplanatory conclusions of any number of classic film thrillers. Besides the dwarf, Jill's antagonists and accomplices in this seesaw caper include a malnourished dog, a baffled water-delivery man, and an all-night veterinarian. It's hard to understand how they all interrelate and signify—but there are occasional fleeting echoes of James Purdy's Malcolm, another colorfully giddy tale of an embattled innocent. Darker matters are suggested—a father who may have had his son killed; the likelihood that Jill helped her cancer-ridden mother to die—but Banbury leaves these undeveloped. A smoothly written debut, graced with neat turns of phrase (a vomiting cat ``convulsed . . . like a furry accordion''; a roller- coaster ``loop[s] through the dark like a low-hanging constellation''), but its arbitrary weirdness makes it a chore to wade through. Interesting, overall, but crucially flawed.
Pub Date: Feb. 4, 1998
ISBN: 0-316-17110-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1997
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 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
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