An easy though sometimes meandering bildungsroman best suited for dudes into cars, girls and teenage defiance.
Set in the 1950s, Lindsay’s first work of fiction follows the adolescence of Sonny Mitchell as he and his buddies get into trouble, tinker with cars and grow up bit by bit.
This coming-of-age novel set in Willamette, Ore., tours the physical, emotional and, most importantly, vehicular landscapes of the 1950s as seen by young narrator Sonny, who’s always flanked by his gang of pals. The crew never tires of living up to the name given to them by a local curmudgeon: “little bastards.” Spinning an easygoing American tale, Sonny wheels his way around a fairly charmed youth, working on farms, drooling after cars and girls, and listening to rock ’n’ roll. As he and his posse get older, they find themselves deeply obsessed with the hot rod and drag racing scenes, and much of the drama of the novel unfolds around souping up cars and competing with peers for the titles of fastest and flashiest—not that there’s too much action moving the plot forward. Rather, Lindsay prefers to ruminate repeatedly on the fun and freedom of being a hot-rodding, blue-collar boy in the ’50s, a nostalgia clearly close to his heart. Despite the lack of action, the prose is breezy, and the novel will interest readers who lived through the era, particularly car lovers and especially men. Indeed, Lindsay focuses heavily on masculinity, sometimes so much so that a whiff of misogyny seems near. The fact that Sonny has a sister is mentioned just twice, and the hormones rage unchecked; at one point, Sonny describes checking out a girl at the pool with his friends as “weighing and judging like it was a meat auction.”
An easy though sometimes meandering bildungsroman best suited for dudes into cars, girls and teenage defiance.Pub Date: Dec. 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1494356736
Page Count: 288
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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