A grandiose but uninvolving tale of embattled queer communities.
Gay people battle homophobes in modern-day San Francisco and ancient Sodom and Gomorrah in this debut fantasy thriller.
When gay programmer Arthur Stevenson joins his co-workers at San Francisco’s Tech2AI Company for a group meditation session after the 2016 presidential election, he has a strange vision of a burning town, which he identifies as the biblical city of Sodom. But contrary to the Genesis story, in which God destroyed Sodom for deviancy, Arthur’s subsequent visions portray it, Gomorrah, and the three other “cities in the plain” as utopias of peace, prosperity, abundant leisure time, and acceptance of LGBTQ lifestyles. In the visions, King Chedorlaomer of the powerful hill city of Elam teams up with homophobic patriarch Abraham to try to conquer gender-nonconforming peoples. Back in modern times, San Francisco’s residents are captivated by accounts of Arthur’s visions when a newspaper publishes them—as is John Wesley the Third, the antigay leader of the fundamentalist “Baptodist Church,” who mobilizes all his resources, including a minion in President Donald Trump’s White House and a spy at Tech2AI, to destroy Arthur, his friends, and his gay-positive message. Fortunately, Arthur’s vision quest gives him superpowers, including the ability to immobilize people, which he uses against various bad guys, including a terrorist and alt-right thugs. Kaboli’s yarn stitches together two thematically related narratives—a reworking of the Bible into a saga of enlightened libertines confronting hatred, and a reprise of it thousands of years later with contemporary politics. However, neither is very focused or gripping. Although there are assassinations, bombings, and even tongue amputations, this long series starter bogs down in a profusion of sketchy side characters and backstories, scenes of characters rehashing plot points that readers already know, and gassy ruminations: “There is a back channel within humans that can bypass default to reach free will and liberty.” Still, Kaboli does sometimes manage to poignantly evoke a particular mood: “When Sam felt overcome with the impossibility of being with Melody, he disappeared from the world into the darkness of his lonely apartment, sitting on his sofa, staring at the reflected street light on his wall for hours.”
A grandiose but uninvolving tale of embattled queer communities.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-73268-061-6
Page Count: 500
Publisher: Simple Tales LLC
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2018
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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