An engaging, eccentric take on love and family.
In Michaels’ debut novel, a professor explores sexual relationships with his cousins and in-laws.
On the surface, Jon Marcus seems to live a rather ordinary existence as a history professor with a wife and daughter, but his life has been far from conventional. Early in the novel, readers meet Jon’s cousin Julie; even as children, Jon and Julie’s mutual attraction is palpable, and by the time they are of legal age, they can’t help but consummate their love. Their affair gives them a son—a secret they keep from the boy, named Jayson, and later from their respective spouses. Jon goes on to have sexual relations with another cousin, Cheryl; his brother’s wife, Wendy; and his wife’s sister, Laura. But when his mother is diagnosed with lung cancer, his life begins to unravel. His son reappears in a surprising, ironic way, as Jon tries to remain afloat while everything around him seems to be sinking. Readers may be tempted to see the book as a simple chronicle of conquests, but Jon’s genuine, down-to-earth manner makes it hard to dismiss him as a kinky playboy. The plot is even somewhat Shakespearean—thick with outlandish characters and themes of deception and love. As such, the novel may seem a bit over-the-top at times, but it’s well-written and often funny, as when Jon says, “I could do a short guidebook on romantic Italian restaurants to take your sisters-in-law to before and after you sleep with them.” It’s also quite self-aware, which keeps the plot from becoming silly; for example, academic Jon is interested in laws and taboos, which allows Michaels to weave several literary references about love and masculinity into the story. Conventional familial relationships, the novel seems to say, can be much darker than forbidden ones.
An engaging, eccentric take on love and family.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-0989099301
Page Count: 260
Publisher: The Brabant Press
Review Posted Online: July 25, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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