Heaven trivialized as a pop-culture paradise without evident irony—a hellish idea.
In newcomer Neches’s cutesy take on the afterlife, Jonathan Livingston Seagull ranks right up there with the Bible and Aristotle; the Supreme Being sounds like Bette Midler; and bathroom functions, but not sex, have been eliminated.
In this heavenly hierarchy new souls like pretty, blond Skye Sebring start out as greeters, then usually spend a stretch as guardian angels before earning their first life on earth. So imagine Skye’s surprise at the Hospitality annual awards banquet when she is chosen to live on earth. Scared, Skye takes a prep course in which she learns that all she needs is Beatles lyrics to prosper. Meanwhile, down on earth, handsome Atlanta lawyer and presidential offspring Ryan Blaine attempts to adjust to the changes he’s noticed in his wife since her own near-death experience a year earlier. Susan had been a veterinarian, a classy, beautiful blond with whom he shared a magical sex life. Since her near fatal car accident, Susan has no affinity for animals, adores Johnny Cash (is that so bad?) and reads gossip magazines. Plus the sex stinks. Ryan sticks by his wife hoping she’ll snap out of it, but new Susan is really Emily, Susan’s skanky separated-at-birth twin. When Susan had gone to meet her without Ryan’s knowledge, Emily beat her, robbed her and left her for dead, before cracking up her car. The real Susan has been lying in a coma in a nursing home in Birmingham. Now awakened, she has no memory of her old life. Back in heaven, Skye learns she is not really a new soul, but an old soul in limbo, i.e. Susan. The Supreme Being has made getting Susan’s earth life happily resolved a top priority—no wonder things haven’t been going better in Iraq.
Heaven trivialized as a pop-culture paradise without evident irony—a hellish idea.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7432-9248-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2007
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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