A novel featuring warmed-over nostalgia among the academic set.
A high-stakes techno-thriller about researchers in 1960s Berkeley, California.
Graduate student Will Getz is at the top of his game. He has a supportive professor at one of the pre-eminent research institutions in the country; a beautiful, talented girlfriend; and a future that seems full of promise—until he makes one giant mistake. His attempt to synthesize pfaffidine, a naturally occurring plant compound with potential uses in cancer treatments, hits a wall when he can’t repeat the 12th and final step in his experiment. Rather than admit failure, he commits the ultimate sin against science by falsifying his results, setting off a calamitous chain of events that will eventually claim more than one life. The term “sin” is apt here, as Rodricks’ novel is Christ-haunted, to borrow a term that author Flannery O’Connor once applied to her native South. It features at least one lapsed Catholic priest, a host of newly secular scientists (among them Will and his on-again, off-again girlfriend, Gina), a nominal Zen monk, and a dangerous cult that appropriates some of Christianity’s more macabre iconography. Throughout, the author keeps the plot moving at a quick pace, but never sacrifices character development. Readers learn, for instance, about Will’s and Gina’s fraught family lives—their commonalities, no doubt, serve to bring them closer. But for all the novel’s vaunted civil rights and counterculture sympathies (it name-checks the Rev. Martin Luther King and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, and pillories the Vietnam War), its female characters get short shrift. Although Gina and another woman, Elaine, occasionally speak about subjects other than men, their lives are wholly defined by their associations with them, primarily Will himself. Rodricks’ prose is authoritative, particularly when he describes the science behind pfaffidine, and it’s often pleasurable to read. However, he stalks too-easy quarry; other authors have already adequately eulogized the lost idealism of the ’60s, and Rodricks neither adds to that literature nor runs counter to its chief claims.
A novel featuring warmed-over nostalgia among the academic set.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2011
ISBN: 978-1463623951
Page Count: 404
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 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
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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