McManus seems enamored of trapping his characters in hillbilly hell and stranding both them and readers there—for an...
Backcountry doom and gloom in tales that strive for authenticity and occasionally achieve it.
This second collection by the 24-year-old McManus (Stop Breakin’ Down, 2000) paints portraits of losers on their spirals into the depths—something that doesn’t always translate into must-read fiction. The opener, “Brood,” concerns a teenaged girl whose mother has just moved in with her new boyfriend met over the Internet. The new beau’s son, Eammon, has malformed teeth and an ugly disposition, so of course he’s been hitting on her nonstop. Everyone talks at everyone else in half-understood ciphers, coded text that takes more time to decipher than one really wants to spend. In “Aurora,” a young boy drives the freeways with his stickup-man father and pregnant, gloomy mother. They appear to be on a halfhearted sort of crime spree, the parents arguing and the father trying to keep his son’s spirits up. Meanwhile, this nuclear family thinks that the atmosphere outside is full of radiation, closing in on them like the law, who could be setting up roadblocks any minute: one of the better selections here, the story is a powerful portrait of the invisible forces waiting to engulf us all. One of the only pieces that breaks the mold is “Cowrie,” about two young friends in Australia, one an Iranian immigrant who says that, during the Iran-Iraq war, he shot an uncounted number of Iraqi soldiers his age or younger. The two hitch a ride from a couple of good ol’ boys, the Iranian dressed up as a woman to entice drivers. Along the way, he tells the men about his exploits during the war, convincing them he’s female, and they speed off down the freeway, swapping stories. Again, it doesn’t come to much—and doesn’t leave much of an impression.
McManus seems enamored of trapping his characters in hillbilly hell and stranding both them and readers there—for an inordinate amount of time.Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-30185-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2002
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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