A funny, poignant story of two flawed souls struggling to put themselves back together.
An alcoholic in decline finds redemption–or maybe just more trouble–in the form of a fetching waitress-in-distress in this charming romance.
Thomas Aquinas “Tam” Malonee is fleeing a failed marriage, as well as the police, for stealing a car and some money from his father-in-law. At a Tennessee diner, he meets Madison Monroe, a blonde, trailer-trash siren who takes his order but also has some specials of her own to request. Tam agrees to drive Madison to Florida so she can take her six-year-old daughter away from her abusive ex-husband. A picaresque road trip ensues. Madison drags Tam to her uncle’s funeral, which develops into a brawl between feuding redneck clans. Tam reunites with his father, a physicist who abandoned the family during his childhood, which develops into an armed confrontation at a strip club. In addition, the pair meet more quirky and enchanting–and occasionally menacing–characters, acquire a basset hound, live off Tam’s budding artistic genius as a sidewalk portrait painter and swap through a string of dicey vehicles, ending with a 1973 Plymouth Fury III stenciled with “Purple People Eater” in white letters on a bright purple background. When they finally arrive in the Sunshine State, a hurricane is brewing, along with a far murkier custody battle than Tam had anticipated. Accardi (Dry Sterile Thunder, 2004, etc.) fills this affecting, shaggy-dog journey with sharp characterizations and mordant comic turns. Madison is winsome, but with a bite, and Tam is a great study in alcoholic self-pity, self-loathing and self-deception.
A funny, poignant story of two flawed souls struggling to put themselves back together.Pub Date: March 19, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-595-41783-4
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
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 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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