Breathtakingly well-written. And how could one not keep reading, no matter how endless, a book with a line such as “You...
Vast opening salvo in a thunderous assault on the prideful prejudice that separates “us” from “them” in the time of AIDS.
“I may be going back further than necessary in laying out the backstory,” writes author/activist Kramer (Faggots, 1978, etc.), “but if this is the prime complaint against me, I shall remain consistent to my belief that all is better than less than all….I remind you once again that this is my history of the plague.” Our narrator is not quite omniscient, just as this huge book doesn’t exactly sprawl; sometimes it lounges like an odalisque, and sometimes it huffs up to grizzly bear proportions. Ever the controversialist, Kramer doesn’t hesitate to start on provocative ground: After introducing us to an alter ego–ish writer who is struggling with an equally massive history of the American people—the other ones, the ones who are enduring this “Plague of The Underlying Condition”—he announces that “the First American People are monkeys who ate each other.” Say what? Kramer’s anthropology may have its debatable points, but it points both to the antiquity of the illness and to a human condition—ahem, underlying condition—of violence and segregation, to a chronology that hurtles forward to Ronald Reagan’s coded assurance that there was indeed an “us” and a “them” at play in the terrible disease. The victims are endless: “sailors, whores, orphaned children, the abscessed, the poxed, the near-dead, and yes, the dead” figure in Kramer’s genealogy, which, for all of its awareness of the Grim Reaper, is defiantly lively. There is nary a dog in these pages that is not supremely shaggy, never a missed opportunity to offend someone. Kramer ranges among voices, eras and styles, the dominant ones being steely anger shading into Pynchon-esque goofiness but always with serious intent.
Breathtakingly well-written. And how could one not keep reading, no matter how endless, a book with a line such as “You don’t just drop a penis like Tibby’s into the narrative and let it go”?Pub Date: April 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-374-10439-9
Page Count: 800
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
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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