A hilariously funny, compact volume about a hotel’s denizens that delivers well-aimed zingers—a winner.
In this comic novel, a young Midwestern woman moves to an eccentric residential hotel in New York City.
Heather Baumhauer, 27, fresh master’s degree in hand, has no intention of staying in her tiny hometown of Poubelle, Wisconsin: “I’m not going to spreadsheet my life away in snowmobile insurance.” She dreams of moving to New York, where she can meet people from other places and have exotic experiences like riding the subway, eating real bagels, and working in “Something just really international.” Desperate for affordable housing, Heather discovers The Zonderling, a residential hotel for women run by the Altruistic Army. The hotel bears some resemblance to the famous Barbizon (“In the world of New York boardinghouses, the Barbizon was an elegant, fashionable sorority house. The Zonderling was a scrappy Muppets’ Happiness Hotel”). Bathrooms are shared, electricity is sketchy, and few rooms have air conditioning—but the rent remains affordable, something of a miracle. A friendly resident named Jennifer Vang fills Heather and her new North Dakotan roommate, Emily, in on other Zonderling denizens: “Stinky Carrie and Porn Lisa, not to be confused with Normal Lisa,” for example, and the infamous Loretta, an elderly longtime resident who annoys everyone. Heather and Emily pursue employment and learn how to get along in New York, finally joining Jennifer to bring Loretta her richly deserved comeuppance. Niebruegge (Mistake, Wisconsin, 2014) is a gifted comedy writer, with the gems coming fast in this zippy novel. She deftly skewers New York types like “classic finance bros” or ventures like the Urban Woodsman Workshop, whose wooden toys are handcrafted upstate: “The toy manager called it ‘farm to playground.’ ” The novel explores the culture clash faced by Emily and Heather with insight as well as humor; it’s not that Midwesterners aren’t aggressive, but they “preferred hate-baking a cake without adding enough vanilla, and giving it to their nemesis with an I-hate-you smile.” Her portrait of The Zonderling, however zany, feels both affectionate and authentic, leaving readers wanting more.
A hilariously funny, compact volume about a hotel’s denizens that delivers well-aimed zingers—a winner.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9908710-3-3
Page Count: 170
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
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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