An engaging, if somewhat conventional, depiction of an artist’s struggle to find a community and maintain his integrity in...
From childhood, Harley Jay Buchanan views the world through the eyes of an artist, and his drive to develop this vision leads him from 1960s rural Texas to the dynamic, if pretentious, bohemian neighborhoods of New York in this coming-of-age novel.
Growing up in the bleak, drought-stricken landscape of Separation, Texas, Harley lives the normal life of a farmer’s son, doing a man’s work in the fields before school and playing first base on his high school baseball team. But Harley differs from his family and his pals in his compulsion to express the way he sees the world through his drawings and paintings, a divergence that he finds both thrilling and isolating. When he finds his girlfriend having sex with another boy, Harley hits the road to begin his journey toward becoming a real artist. After a promising beginning with a mentor in Dallas, Harley suspends his art education when his second girlfriend becomes pregnant. Ever responsible and decent, he takes a job in the oil fields to support his new family, coming under the patronage of Wendell Whitehead, an earthy oil tycoon, and his aristocratic wife, Mavis. Harley is still determined to get to New York, the center of the art world, and his torturous odyssey leads him to lose everything before finally taking the first steps toward finding himself. Along the way, he learns just how blind he has been to the most important aspects of his life. Asher (My Big Brother’s Birthday, 2015, etc.) has produced a persuasive portrait of a young artist’s passage to manhood, filled with unobtrusively evocative descriptions and characterizations. While some of Harley’s experiences veer from the predictable to the wildly improbable, the protagonist himself remains refreshingly honorable and doggedly persistent in pursuing his goal to become an artist. At one point, he finds inspiration in his own problems (“During the last few days he had at some level been grinding real-life events into a pictorial soup, struggling with how he might translate each ordeal into a graphic experience”). It is unfortunate that one of the work’s climactic scenes rings one of the few false notes in its comic portrayal of near-rape, but the compelling tale still sustains a hopeful tone throughout.
An engaging, if somewhat conventional, depiction of an artist’s struggle to find a community and maintain his integrity in 20th -century America.Pub Date: July 29, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4792-3946-7
Page Count: 456
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2017
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
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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