Contrived zaniness, short on plot and character.
In this fiction debut from Notaro (Autobiography of a Fat Bride, 2003, etc.), a quirky freelance writer from Arizona relocates to Spaulding, Wash., with her professor husband and enters the local “Sewer Pipe Queen” pageant to make friends.
It does not take long after arriving in her new town for Maye to realize she is not in Phoenix anymore. A lovely, liberal enclave with draconian recycling laws, cops hooked on organic donuts and a fitness-minded mailman who jogs his route, Spaulding is also, she realizes, difficult to penetrate for a newcomer who works from home. Friendly and full of good intentions, the chubby writer initially blows it with her husband Charlie’s colleagues after accidentally exposing herself at a party at the Dean’s house. Her subsequent efforts to meet people go awry as well. There is the band of wiccans who want to bathe her, a militant vegetarian who exiles her from his club after he catches her tucking into a juicy steak and a seemingly normal bookstore clerk who goes nuts after one glass of wine too many. Then Maye finds out about the Sewer Pipe Queen. An odd competition where “talent” and originality matter more than beauty, Maye decides that winning will boost her reputation, but only if she can find a former queen to sponsor her. Using her reporting skills, she tracks down the long-lost legendary queen of all Sewer Pipe Queens—Ruby Spicer. Now a crazy old bat raising dogs on the outskirts of town, the hard drinking Ruby is, to say the least, not a traditional mentor. But the two woman bond, with Maye helping to uncover the sad truth as to why Ruby left town. Ruby in turn coaches Maye on a showstopper of an act, in which Maye dances and lip-syncs to an 80s-era Pat Benatar song, accompanied on piano by her Australian Sheepdog Mickey. Really. The book has funny gags, but it feels more like a collection of silly situations that a cohesive novel.
Contrived zaniness, short on plot and character.Pub Date: May 29, 2007
ISBN: 1-4000-6501-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2007
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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