Jam-packed with stereotypes, bad sex scenes, and clichés of every kind, this book has something to appall almost anyone.
The summer of 1992 is pure hell on an insular islet off the coast of Long Island.
“GRUDDER IS CANCER / GRUDDER KILLS,” reads the graffiti on the local war memorial. Tensions flare on Avalon Island as a defense contractor called Grudder Aviation runs into economic and environmental problems. Dealing with the fallout both publicly and privately are three generations of the islands' most prominent families, who live on magnificent side-by-side estates. If an author is God to her characters, the people of Avalon must have done something to offend Fierro (Cutting Teeth, 2014). For lo, she hath visited upon them toxic waste; racial bigotry; class resentment; vandalism; children strung out on drugs watching snuff and porn videos; abusive fathers, husbands, and dog owners; senile dementia; a weak peacetime economy; the rise of Bill Clinton; murder; suicide; stillbirth; and, undoubtedly worst of all, a biblical plague of gypsy moth caterpillars, described over and over in excruciating detail. Young lovers take to the woods—and listen to “the cack-cacking of the caterpillars feeding and the patter of chewed-up leaves spat thousands at a time onto the forest floor.” Jeans are “spattered with [the] black slime” of caterpillar excrement, the little buggers are found in socks, bras, and ball gowns, there are “swarm[s] of caterpillars slithering across the window” and hands “slick with their gummy remains.” Still, as one character points out, "perhaps a plague was just what the island needed." To get them through these revolting times, the characters find inspiration in sources as diverse as the plot of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, the essays of James Baldwin, and the radical enlightenment offered by Oprah: “After each Oprah episode, she was depleted. To have eighty years of preconceived notions shattered, and then rearranged, in just forty-five minutes.”
Jam-packed with stereotypes, bad sex scenes, and clichés of every kind, this book has something to appall almost anyone.Pub Date: June 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-08751-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
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