Dark, brooding fun.
A group of prep schoolers reckon with their ennui thanks to doom metal and a new classmate nicknamed after a famous nihilist.
Iyer has found a niche in seriocomic fiction about very serious philosophers: Wittgenstein Jr (2014) was a funny campus novel about logic, and this follow-up is a funny campus novel about despair. At its center is a group of students in Wokingham, 20 miles away from London, eager to finish classes and move on with their lives. But as their final semester begins, a new arrival, kicked out of his previous school under vague circumstances, at once unsettles their relationships and sharpens their cynicism. The new boy scribbles “NIHILISM” in his notebook, is prone to dark and gnomic pronouncements in class (“All things die in time”), and maintains a blog musing on the meaning(lessness) of suburbia (“Nothing will happen here….Unless the voiding of time is itself an event”). His dour temperament quickly earns him the nickname Nietzsche. (We never learn his real name.) The clique soon welcomes him at school and, later, at band practice, where they’re laboring on droning, sludgy rock that evokes their angst. Iyer neatly captures the way Nietzsche’s philosophy of the eternal return is a perfect fit for cynical teenagers who are sure it’s all been done, but Iyer also wants to explore how frantic teenage emotions challenge their assurances; suicide, love, sex, and self-destructive instincts all figure in the plot. As for comedy, Iyer has a knack for the one-upping banter that demonstrates maturity and insecurity at the same time. The cycles of hope-despair-repeat among the characters get repetitive, but credit Iyer for thinking big: That little garage band is determined to “start a new society” and be a “clue to a new way of life.”
Dark, brooding fun.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61219-812-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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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