New York is colonized by giant talking canines in newcomer Bakis's wry variation on the traditional shaggy dog story. Imagination is the key here. We need to understand that at the end of the 19th century a crazed German biologist named Augustus Rank performed a succession of medical experiments that resulted in a weird genetic mutation of his subjects and created a race of ``monster dogs''—giant rottweilers and Dobermans who can speak and walk on their hind legs. After living for more than a hundred years in the seclusion of a remote Canadian settlement called Rankstadt, they are forced to move in the year 2008 to New York (where 150 of them take up residence at the Plaza Hotel) when Rankstadt is destroyed. In their 19th-century garb—Prussian military uniforms for the ``men,'' bustles for the ``women''—they cut impressive figures on the streets of Manhattan, where they quickly become celebrities and philanthropists. At Christmas they parade down Fifth Avenue in sleighs, and shortly after their arrival they construct an enormous Bavarian castle on the Lower East Side. When an NYU coed named Cleo Pira writes about them for a local newspaper, the dogs adopt her as their spokesperson and bring her into the inner life of their society. From Cleo's perspective the dogs are benign, quaint, and deeply tragic, and the more fascinated she becomes by their history—both as they relate it to her and as she discovers it for herself through Rank's own archives—the darker and more doomed their society appears. By the time Cleo has learned the secrets contained in Rank's past, it's too late to save his descendants, who have unknowingly brought about their own destruction. Serious enough, but also funny and imaginative: a vivid parable that manages to amuse even as it perplexes and intrigues.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-374-18987-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
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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