An imperfect but ambitious and appealing comic tale about parenthood and the financial system.
A satirical novel tells the story of a father and daughter whose blog upends the economic status quo.
Jack Sullivan, a former CEO who sold his company in order to stay home and write a book about creating a moral form of capitalism, is becoming increasingly aware of odd things around the house. Someone is replacing the toilet paper rolls incorrectly, for instance. Then he discovers the culprit in the form of a blog called “In the Doghouse: Experimentations in Social Disruption at Home,” authored by none other than his own 12-year-old daughter, Daisy Peanut. It has 34,602 followers. “There are like a thousand of those blogs out there already,” explains Daisy, when asked why she started messing with her family and putting the results on the internet. “I had to look at my surroundings and figure out what was uniquely me. And what is uniquely me is that you people are weird and I really enjoy making fun of it.” Jack and his wife, Catelyn, feel understandably violated, but when he realizes how engaged Daisy’s audience is—so much more than anyone he’s tried to talk to about the way the financial system is rigged in favor of the powerful—he sees an opportunity. It’s a great success—sort of. Daisy’s 34,602 followers quickly balloon into millions, and Jack has unintentionally created a demagogue with a reach far greater than any of them could have foreseen. Barrett’s (Managed Care, 2018) prose is clever and clear, and he manages to fit a good deal of political critique in his characters’ high jinks. Despite some really tone-deaf jokes about immigrant maids and the word “gay” (and attempts to defend such jests), the narration—and the dialogue in particular—is generally funny and engaging. While the premise is not at all realistic, the plot moves quickly, and the author finds a number of curveballs to throw at his well-drawn characters. While not the height of satire, perhaps, it is rare to find such a readable book that attempts to deal so directly with a major (and fairly complex) social issue.
An imperfect but ambitious and appealing comic tale about parenthood and the financial system.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-68433-310-3
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2019
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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