Superb, often laugh-out-loud first half. Then no more jokes.
Miller abandons suspense (Tropical Heat, 2002, etc.) for what at first looks like a supernatural satire on baseball, reincarnation, and quantum physics—with some of the funniest sports spoofs since Ring Lardner.
When his best friend and deep intellectual companion, Arthur Hodges, a genius physicist and fellow mathematician, dies at 40 (still a stone virgin, wholly obsessed with math theory), Archibald Rhodes, better known as Benny, distinguished professor of mathematics, etc., at MIT and now in his early 60s, gives up his job and boring 40-year marriage to a wealthy wife to go on the road in a mobile home and live up his later years. As for the late Arthur, he’s seemingly too fine a mind to waste merely on death. Had he not been destined to be Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, a chair once held by Sir Isaac Newton himself? In Oklahoma, Benny picks up Becky Morgan, a waitress who has just had her third abortion in 18 months, and settles down with her on the boiling hot edge of the Mojave Desert. She’s gravid yet again. Happy Benny now loses his lifelong interest in the Boston Red Sox, an interest once wholly ignored by Arthur. Meanwhile, the Oakland A’s have signed on Henry Spencer, a phenomenal catcher from North Carolina just out of the Army after three years. Henry, called “Soldier” by his astounded teammates, is supernaturally gifted, it seems, and may well be the greatest baseball player of all time. A magnificent and universally envied physical specimen, Henry’s quite pleasantly weird, can’t remember his past, and speaks of baseball as quantum physics, as if he’s Sir Isaac Newton himself. His teammates, all borderline morons, reel, stunned by Henry’s crazy grasp of the game as he speaks of pitches in terms of Max Planck, Einstein, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, Schrödinger’s cat, and theoretical physics. So what’ll happen if and when Benny meets Henry and sees, hmm, Arthur?
Superb, often laugh-out-loud first half. Then no more jokes.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-765-30627-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2003
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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