Documentary-type findings with a sharp literary twist.
A young serviceman volunteers to work undercover to investigate California state prisons in McCarty’s first novel.
Why would anyone volunteer to work undercover in overcrowded and miserable living conditions inhabited by an assortment of misfits and miscreants? Perhaps they flunked out of Navy SEAL school. That’s how Joseph McCarty ends up enrolled in the military’s Research and Investigation of California’s Administration of Prisons program. He is so disgusted by his failure with the SEALs that he jumps at the chance to do something “exciting and useful for [his] country.” Seph, as he is dubbed by fellow inmates, plunges into the prison’s general population. There, he documents what many already know about life behind bars: self-imposed segregation, violence, lousy food, tension, anger, psychopathy and poor administration—basically, a system completely out of control. He also covers less familiar topics such as lingo, inmate ploys and institutional psychologies and pathologies. Seph could be a character right out of psychologist Philip Zimbardo’s classic Stanford prison experiment, internalizing the traits of the population he is monitoring. Soon enough, he ends up beating one inmate and stabbing another in two premeditated incidents, which he unapologetically describes as justifiable self-defense. The book, while fictional, is an authentic account of life behind bars gleaned from McCarty’s own decade-long incarceration. Ultimately, Seph’s submits an unorthodox set of findings in an informally written diatribe about what needs to be fixed in prison systems. The final chapter posits a twist ending that will appeal to skeptical observers of politics and society.
Documentary-type findings with a sharp literary twist.Pub Date: July 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-1463413231
Page Count: 296
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2012
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
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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