True to its title, this entry in the Fiction from Modern China series is a swirling, irreverent look at China during and after Mao that explodes with displacement and creativity, usually well harnessed. Huang Haha is a Chinese woman studying in London, but this novel jumps all over the map, from first- to third-person and from Haha's childhood to the present. Haha herself is attempting to write a novel and comes up with ``a ragbag of half-told stories, half-formed ideas and half-remembered incidents.'' Which pretty much describes the structure of Sola's novel, but thematically the material holds together, with thanks due to the outstanding translation, which manages to keep up the breakneck pace. Haha recalls different incidents: her attempts to follow her brother into the Red Guard, her relationship with a London teacher, time spent in the country learning how to be a peasant. Haha notes that the ``most essential qualification for being a Red Guard was that you had to be able to say to people's faces the kinds of things you usually only find written on toilet walls,'' and she recalls an escalating schoolyard cursing duet she performed with a friend in hopes of being accepted into the Red Guard when she was 11. In relation to her time in the countryside, she gives a long treatise on feces, explaining how ``we learned that shit really was worth its weight in gold'' because of its fertilizing properties. Her time in London also provides fodder for irony, as Haha observes that ``For Londoners, eating with chopsticks was a symbol of refinement, like eating a bun on a fork in Peking.'' Occasionally, Sola seems to get too much of a kick from scatological remarks, but this quick-witted novel (which has been published in Hong Kong but not in China) is a head-twirling treat. Punchy and hilarious, and simultaneously melancholy and acerbic.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8248-1617-X
Page Count: 144
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
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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