A political satire wanders off course after a promising start.
A small city mayoral race takes some strange turns when a freakish creature dominates the race.
Former journalist Gray Davenport’s life is about as exciting as his nondescript name. Campaign consultant to a perennial also-ran who's floundering again in a three-man race for mayor of Grand River, a pollution-drenched West Coast city whose government is controlled by a cabal of shadowy businessmen, pulling the strings from the local gated community, he’s drowning in self-pity, not least because his marriage to an aspiring (if untalented) artist, fond of Jackson Pollock–like paint splatters, is crumbling. When Reason Wilder, an 8-foot-tall candidate who bears a striking resemblance to a famous 19th-century literary monster, captures the imagination of Grand River’s citizens, with his vaguely populist claims to offer “A way of the people. A way that reflects us all,” Gray sets out to unravel the mystery behind his appeal. That effort (and Gray’s emotional life) is complicated after the alluring Breeze Wellington, a marketing expert with a previous life as a porn star, appears in town and thrusts herself into a campaign that’s soon noteworthy for its deception and betrayal. Ponepinto’s (Curtain Calls, 2015) style doesn’t lack wit or an apt turn of phrase capable of evoking an audible chuckle, as when he describes the “astrologically-themed downtown grid” of Grand River that produces a street named “Cancer Boulevard,” but those talents only carry this uneven novel so far. There are sufficient twists to keep the plot energized, but the pallid protagonist eventually becomes more irritating than sympathetic. Ponepinto has some definite ideas about the flaws of the democratic process—notably, how easy it is to manipulate public opinion—but he wobbles between satirizing the shortcomings of political life and exploring the science-fiction elements of Reason’s existence, including the machinations of the corrupt genius who created him, without fully committing to either story. That structural flaw becomes especially apparent as the novel lurches toward its bizarre climax.
A political satire wanders off course after a promising start.Pub Date: March 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9984092-4-5
Page Count: 300
Publisher: 7.13 Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
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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