A mad tale of a mad genius, by a young author (Ex Utero, 1995) who may be a genius herself. The coming-of-age story has a long tradition behind it and is usually pretty easy to spot. Foos constructs hers with all the traditional materials—adolescent confusion, anger, family conflict, fear—built upon a foundation of allegory rather than realism, and the effect is as unsettling as a Tudor mansion erected in the desert. Frances Fisk, our narrator, is only 18, but she's already starting to come apart at the seams. Her late father, an artist who gained attention for his sculptures of men with chainsaws, became increasingly deranged and reclusive, dying of dehydration in a bathtub. Frances herself, with the passage of time, has grown more and more obsessed with her father and his art. Meanwhile, her mother Arlene, now married to professional bowler Stanley Boardman (``the Kingpin''), is so determined that her daughter not follow in her father's footsteps that she forbids Frances to work on her shark sculptures and insists that she take up bowling instead. ``If I had known walruses were waiting for me on some back road in Florida,'' Frances complains, ``I might have taken more of an interest in bowling.'' Why? Because the walruses Frances sees mating at the aquarium become a new obsession, one that ultimately saves her from madness and brings her to the realization that she's a poet rather than a sculptor. By the time this recognition transpires, the reader has been immersed in Frances's world long enough to understand, or at least accept, the odd logic that prevails in it, and the real strength of the narrative is the clarity with which it translates private griefs and misapprehensions into coherent symbols capable of advancing an astonishingly original story. Brilliant, fresh, and remarkable: one of the few works of recent years in which brave originality is sustained by genuine skill.
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-56889-057-8
Page Count: 175
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1997
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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