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THE LIVING ONE

An 800-pound gorilla of a horror novel: the powerful, unpredictable, and dreadfully self-indulgent tale of a centuries- old entity. First-novelist Gannett, a former waiter, is that rarity in horror, a serious (if undisciplined) stylist with original ideas as well. His story builds through 59 letters, diary fragments, ``chronicles,'' and so on, told in myriad voices—including those of teenager Torrance Spoor; Torrance's impossibly rich father, Malcolm; Sheila Massif, Torrance's schoolteacher; and Duane Allbright, a psychic. Torrance has been called away from his mom in California to live with his dad in a mansion overlooking the Atlantic; also living there are an eccentric valet, Pip; 12 ferocious hounds with hypnotic eyes; and a hothouse of sentient roses. Torrance, who's gay—there's explicit gay as well as hetero sex here—suspects that his father is a voyeur: Why else the hidden cameras trained on Torrance at all times? But soon a far worse truth unveils: Malcolm is the ``Living One,'' an entity of great psychic powers cursed from medieval times to immortality by fathering a son, then trading bodies with the son and murdering the paternal body in which the son is now trapped, generation after generation—with Torrance as new sacrifice. Turning to Sheila for help, Torrance impregnates her—and draws the attention of Duane, her lover, who realizes that Pip, the roses, and the dogs are key to Malcolm's powers. The action—and overripe prose (``I do not know. I do not know! And the pistol, where is it? He did not bring it! A knife, a knife I could find, oh I am feeling ill!'')—swells to a melodramatic crescendo that twists into new life for Malcolm and Torrance—and an uncertain future. Gannett has talent to burn—and sets fire to much of it here. Wild, imaginative, and vastly overwritten, his novel enthralls yet infuriates—and leaves one yearning for his next.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1993

ISBN: 0-679-41080-5

Page Count: 381

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992

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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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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

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

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

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