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ANNO-DRACULA

Newman goes over the top in every novel (Night Mayor, Bad Dreams, Jago), each featuring a monstrous overlord of horror unlikely to be dethroned—but this time he leaps to new heights, drawing the Dracula novel that sets a benchmark for vampire fiction. Warning: the blood, well, you can't say it's overdone, for a vampire novel, but two qualities distinguish Newman's story: the immense physiological detail shoring up the reality of the undead, and the gathering sense of the author's enjoyment in what he does here—among other things, his sheer love of chockablock Victorian detail. The plot: Vlad Tepes, or Dracula, did not die as in Bram Stoker but rather survived and, political genius, rose to marry Queen Victoria in 1885 and become her consort. Dracula rules England, with Victoria doglike in a leash at his feet. What's more, it's now fashionable to be a vampire, especially among the nobility, while among the lower orders the change from ``warm'' to the immortal undead can be bought from any corner whore for the price of a shot of gin or draft of pig's blood at the pub. Jack the Ripper, however, hates undead whores and knows that destroying any vital organ can kill them. Who is Jack? None other that Stoker's Dr. John (Jack) Seward, who helped drive a stake into Lucy Westenra, Stoker's heroine. Jack's gone round the bend, living among a people who look upon vampirism as, well, pretty nice. The police assign Genevieve Dieuxdonne, a vampire detective, herself a half-century older than Dracula, to chase down Jack, assisted by Charles Beauregard, handsome henchman of Conan Doyle's The Diogenes Club, England's Star Chamber. Also on hand: Mycroft Holmes, Dr. Jekyll, and dozens of famed Victorians from literature and real life, all mingling in a fogbound milieu that rubs like cat fur on the reader's imagination. A bloody delight.

Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1993

ISBN: 0-88184-967-7

Page Count: 368

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1993

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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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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

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

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

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