A didactic, expositional tale about the current political divide.
In this political thriller, Tennert (A Prominent Role, 2018) tells the story of a traumatized man who believes that a powerful group is controlling America.
Justin Patterson, an Indianapolis psychiatrist, is married to Clarissa, a local politician, with whom he has two children. He and his wife have been together since college, but their differing political ideologies are beginning to drive a wedge between them. After Justin survives a mass shooting in a restaurant, Clarissa, a fervent gun rights advocate, excoriates him for not having had his gun on him. The brush with death has left him traumatized, which harms his practice and drives him to explore new political ideas. He begins to suspect that wealthy, powerful people are conspiring to control events and public perceptions for their own ends. Justin calls their system “the Armory”: “It had the ammunition to wage a ruthless war of indoctrination and abuse for an indefinite amount of time. It had the power to decide what is right and what isn’t.” Justin hires a receptionist, Lindsey Couture, who provides a sympathetic ear as his marriage to Clarissa—who’s now running for mayor of Indianapolis—continues to deteriorate. He suffers a fall in his building’s stairwell that puts him in a five-day coma; he suspects that he was pushed by a man associated with the Armory. As he attempts to challenge the system that he suspects is arrayed against him, he must also deal with the PTSD that continues to haunt him. The novel deals directly and ambitiously with the major political issues and climate of the past decade. However, Tennert’s prose style has an unnatural wordiness that feels somewhat dated, like that of 19th-century fiction: “My happiness for the political system showed signs of cracking under gradual pressure. Diverse segments and stories from numerous media outlets reported on contentious topics.” It also repetitively and distractingly refers to the aforementioned restaurant as an “eatery” 15 times. The book often reads more like a summary of a novel, with many incidents reported rather than shown. In the end, readers may be unsure how they’re supposed to feel about Justin—or even how the author feels about him.
A didactic, expositional tale about the current political divide.Pub Date: July 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5255-0380-1
Page Count: 222
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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