A slim, cerebral, and often compelling novel about an offbeat relationship.
Two New Yorkers dive into a tempestuous love affair in Kingery’s debut novel.
One winter day in 2000, 22-year-old Leah Manis and a man named Jareth crash into each other’s lives—literally—when she collides with him on an icy Manhattan sidewalk and they land in a heap. They quickly strike up an unlikely rapport after Jareth, with a twisted ankle and covered in Leah’s takeout, admits to playfully pocketing her wallet, noting that city folk are “tricksters and opportunists.” They soon agree to meet at a diner for lunch the next day. The discussion is fast and light: Leah loves Jackie Chan movies and sometimes spray-paints graffiti in the shape of a teacup in tribute to the actor (who collects teacups); Jareth reveals that he’s a phone-sex operator and comments that he’s never had a bad gyro. They meet again and again, and after Leah brings Jareth back to her apartment, the two spiral into a fast-moving, logorrheic, and self-referential intimacy. Three of Leah’s secrets come out: She suffers from a mitochondrial disorder that causes her to sleep for 18 hours each day; she’s the wealthy orphaned child of two famous doctors; and she’s a virgin. As the kinetic relationship races along, will the pair save each other from their respective dissatisfactions with life? The book is mostly dialogue, which proves to be a weakness and a strength. Kingery writes urgent, unexpected sentences, and readers will feel swept up in the conversation—almost as much as Leah and Jareth are. However, it’s not without imperfections, as both parties speak in such an odd and oblique manner that the frequent lack of dialogue tags can leave one lost as to who’s speaking: “ ‘What if you had a kajillion hockenfurs?’ ‘A whatity-what now?’ ‘Exactly one kajillion hockenfurs. Hockenfurs are defined as the energy you need to live.’ ” The plot, such as it is, is surprisingly engrossing, as Kingery is happy to push her couple into increasingly strange, unexpected, and existential territory. Readers will likely walk away excited to see what Kingery delivers in the future.
A slim, cerebral, and often compelling novel about an offbeat relationship.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2021
ISBN: 979-8-59-003566-3
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Capricious Codex Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.
Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.
It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior. Like pretty much everyone else in Lee County, Virginia, hollowed out economically by the coal and tobacco industries, he sees himself as someone with no prospects and little worth. One of Kingsolver’s major themes, hit a little too insistently, is the contempt felt by participants in the modern capitalist economy for those rooted in older ways of life. More nuanced and emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it. Kingsolver’s ferocious indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, angrily stated by a local girl who has become a nurse, is in the best Dickensian tradition, and Demon gives a harrowing account of his descent into addiction with his beloved Dori (as naïve as Dickens’ Dora in her own screwed-up way). Does knowledge offer a way out of this sinkhole? A committed teacher tries to enlighten Demon’s seventh grade class about how the resource-rich countryside was pillaged and abandoned, but Kingsolver doesn’t air-brush his students’ dismissal of this history or the prejudice encountered by this African American outsider and his White wife. She is an art teacher who guides Demon toward self-expression, just as his friend Tommy provokes his dawning understanding of how their world has been shaped by outside forces and what he might be able to do about it.
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-325-1922
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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