Strong, wide-ranging tales that more than fulfill the promise of the author’s first book.
In the year 2000, as the millennium shifts, the characters in these 11 short stories shift their own perceptions by connecting with others.
Behar (Turn the Page, 2015, etc.) explains in an author’s note that he first drafted these tales in 1998 and 2002; as a result, a millennial preoccupation with change is at the heart of this well-observed collection. In the opening story, “Death Threats,” a struggling rock band finds itself making a devil’s bargain with Jennifer Newman, the daughter of a hated radio station owner. They’d hoped to manipulate her father by getting her to sing with them; soon, as the band’s lead singer, she brings them new success, but the narrator misses their old freedom, which is gone like Jennifer’s former pudginess: “they swear 2000 is the year we make it big…[but] when I look at Jennifer’s washboard stomach, all I can think about is what we’ve lost.” As this example shows, change can be transformative but also uncomfortable—or even strange, as in the story “Seepage.” In it, a suburban couple’s sweaty sensuality, symbolized by a fuel oil leak, at first disgusts their straight-laced neighbors, only to later become a welcome, if unwholesome, seduction. Other stories, told from first- and third-person perspectives, explore a range of viewpoints, including that of a young boy puzzled by his Chinese friend’s grandmother and her superstitions; those of a 30-ish yuppie couple hoping to adopt a Russian boy; and that of a young woman going fishing with her boyfriend. In all these situations, Behar ably employs a flexible, natural voice to trace his characters’ realizations. For example, in the final story, a makeup artist for a flamboyant women’s wrestling team describes an unlikely but dramatic romance between a fan and a wrestler: “I held out for a guy who would look at me the way Red had looked at Mount Fuji. It took fifteen years for that guy to come along. It was worth the wait.”
Strong, wide-ranging tales that more than fulfill the promise of the author’s first book.Pub Date: Nov. 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5393-3015-8
Page Count: 212
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 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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