Shaping and cutting would have been helpful, but first-novelist Brady writes with energy and authenticity.
Two guitar-playing Texas brothers come of age in the 1970s and travel parallel paths through the southern music scene.
Sick of his father Big Billy Jay’s abuse and itching to make his fortune, 17-year-old blues boy Sonny Blaine leaves behind the small town of Mingus and heads for Austin with his new Fender guitar. It’s 1967, and Sonny and his group, the White Tornadoes, already have some experience and a broad repertoire, including selections from the recent British Invasion. Supercool band member Johnny Lee Hogan, high yellow bassist who always wears sunglasses, widens the Tornadoes’ appeal to colored clubs as well. Sonny’s only regret is leaving behind beloved brother Walker, likely to bear the brunt of dad’s bad temper in his absence; Sonny gives Walker his prized Broadcaster guitar by way of goodbye. Before long, Walker follows Sonny, and trouble follows Walker in the person of girlfriend Nancy, who claims to be pregnant, and her brother Floyd, who’s angry enough to whale on the young man. Sonny defuses this situation and, after Nancy’s condition turns out to be a false alarm, snags the young woman on the rebound, a situation that does little to further brotherly harmony. (A few years later, Walker returns the favor by sleeping with—though he’s married—the unrequited love of Sonny’s life, Cilla, a musician and the daughter of legendary British guitarist Reg Mountbatten.) Walker marries a blazingly talented singer named Vada, who is equally devoted to him and to cocaine, while Sonny becomes known as Firewalker Blaine, and the story comes all the way to the late 1980s and MTV, with career highs and lows, sibling rivalry, and changing music trends.
Shaping and cutting would have been helpful, but first-novelist Brady writes with energy and authenticity.Pub Date: July 15, 2004
ISBN: 0-9708293-3-7
Page Count: 411
Publisher: Coral Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2004
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
