Mostly harmless fun with a large cast of zany characters and many chaotic situations.
A comical look at the world of Southern drag queen pageants.
Greenwell (Who the Hell is Rachel Wells?, 2013) opens his entertaining novel with its protagonist and narrator, Chester Davis, pleasantly sandwiched in bed between Zac Efron and Ryan Reynolds. Sadly for Chester, his fantasy sequence is the result of a concussion-induced hallucination. The author then takes us back approximately one year when the waiflike Chester escapes at the age of 21 from the trailer park where he lives with his abusive, homophobic grandmother outside of Birmingham, Alabama. (For most of the book, Chester goes by the name of his stage persona, Daphne DeLight, and feminine pronouns are used.) To Greenwell’s credit, there is a lot of action packed into that year as an eclectic group of supporters at Club Diva helps Daphne hone her craft and pursue her ambitious goal of winning the title of Miss Gay Drag Queen Alabama. As boyfriends Sam and Mike, the first two characters to offer Daphne a helping hand, discuss her developmental issues and extreme social awkwardness, Sam objects to Mike’s use of the term “retarded.” Mike responds: “Okay…challenged, slow, low IQ, autistic, whatever the term. She can barely even read, for God’s sakes.” Greenwell constructs Daphne as the proverbial babe in the woods who requires frequent explanations. This may illuminate readers unfamiliar with certain subcultures; however, this technique slows down the narrative as Daphne interprets language literally, and readers wait for yet another explanation from a frazzled mentor. For instance, at one point, Sam compares Daphne to a young Elizabeth Taylor, then feels compelled to add: “Well, thinner, blonder, and younger…you do have blue eyes. Not violet, but blue. Close enough.” The use of this transparent device seems like a convoluted, awkward way to convey basic information like the protagonist’s eye color. Although the book contains a few stereotypes, racial and otherwise, it reaches a satisfying conclusion when Greenwell reveals the cause of Daphne’s concussion as well as the root of her social and academic difficulties.
Mostly harmless fun with a large cast of zany characters and many chaotic situations.Pub Date: April 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-937627-24-9
Page Count: 238
Publisher: Chelsea Station Editions
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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