A vigorous, sometimes-entertaining, but unconvincing tale of future imperfect.
A boy is raised to have a perfect life—as defined by a team of corporate scientists—in this strident satire of a near-future dystopia.
In the year 2020, the World Government—its president chosen by the World Economic Forum, its Congress composed of representatives from the 300 highest earning global corporations—adopts newborn Jimmy Clark as the prototype for its program of offering all citizens a perfect life. He is made handsome by infant cosmetic surgery, raised by a preternaturally nurturing robot, provided with a constant feed of drugs to keep his mood elevated and stable, and sent to Manhattan’s finest private schools to acquire not knowledge but the “skills” indispensable for success: grit, teamwork, data-crunching, and back-stabbing. Jimmy joins an investment firm run by his benefactor, a fundamentalist Christian plutocrat who thinks God and Mammon get along fine, and soon amasses his own business empire, including a company wrapping the planet in an electronically linked supersystem called “the Internet of Things Web.” The only complication in Jimmy’s life is Chelsea, a school sweetheart and dissident in an underground hacktivist group. Despite her rebellious proclivities, the World Government insists she marry Jimmy: “Your role is to support Jimmy’s success and make him happy. If you don’t, you’ll both be vaporized.” The novel’s rickety, absurdist plot and stick-figure characters—Jimmy is a Candide-like naif, Chelsea a doctrinaire romantic—exist mainly as pegs on which to hang Spring’s (Globalization of Education: An Introduction, 2014, etc.) vision of softly totalitarian capitalism that is a lurid extension of current trends. The colorful world features driverless cabs, unctuous artificial intelligence, custom-flavored synthetic food, and inescapable video surveillance, even during sex. Plastic forests feature animatronic fauna, and a global water vendor pollutes rivers and lakes so locals will have to buy its products. Substituting for happiness are drugs and an ethos of “shoppiness”: artificially induced dream fantasies bring crowds stampeding into malls. Among the bogus claims of convenience and personal empowerment, Spring’s spoof of consumer culture is often funny, and there’s an Orwellian verve to his prose: “If it wasn’t for your mother, we would reeducate you at the We Love You Farm.” But his dystopia feels less like a prophetic cautionary tale than a compendium of Occupier paranoias, with victims who are too robotic themselves to really care about.
A vigorous, sometimes-entertaining, but unconvincing tale of future imperfect.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-692-48578-1
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Phoenix Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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