An overly chaotic tale from a wondrous wordsmith.
A group of unlikely allies tries to escape from Limbo in Folk’s debut novel.
Welcome to the Seam, “a way station between life as you know it, and death.” The essences of people who are unconscious or comatose go there, and they may or may not be allowed to return to the world they knew. Nine-year-old Frank Frandoza is one of those essences trying to get back to the real world, where the last thing he remembers is the ceiling of his underground fort crashing down upon him. Imagine his surprise waking up in the Seam, with seven talking barracudas swimming around him in midair. He finds an ally in Ivan Blastov, a “cool kid” from his hometown who was recently felled in a brawl by a glass bottle to the head. Frank and Ivan must navigate the surreal, absurdist world of the Seam, populated with such entities as a gorilla in a nurse’s uniform and a polar bear in a leotard. Through an unlikely plan involving electrocution and the formation of a rock band, they manage to return to the real world. The only problems are the difficulties awaiting them there—and all the people still being detained in the Seam. Folk is a writer of unending imagination, spewing puns and ridiculous characters on page after page: “Lou was a human remora attached to a nose. If Lou had been a rock star, his name would have been Schnozzy Schnosbourne, and his stage would have been Nostrilpalooza.” The story is accompanied by full-color illustrations (also by Folk) that are somehow even odder than his literary creations—simultaneously creepy, silly, and brutally adorable. Readers may feel ungrateful for becoming frustrated with such ingenuity, but after a while, there’s simply too much: the plot can’t keep pace with Folk’s manic creations, and the supposedly life-and-death stakes never truly feel urgent. For all the tireless punning, readers may lose interest before the writer does.
An overly chaotic tale from a wondrous wordsmith.Pub Date: July 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9965159-1-7
Page Count: 226
Publisher: Eye Read Books
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2015
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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