by Louis B. Jones ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1993
A pivotal 24 hours in the life of a yuppie physicist whose neighbor persuades him that their condos are in danger of being seized by a faceless corporation in a bizarre legal action. Already over the hill at 27, Berkeley physicist Mark Perdue waves goodbye to his bride Audrey, a Palo Alto patent attorney busy in licensing negotiations of properties on the theme of the Pope's impending US visit, and steps quietly over one of those cartoon cliffs that continue to hold you up as long as you don't notice anything amiss. Roger Hoberman, Mark's ludicrously unsuccessful pizza- franchiser neighbor in the Cobblestone Hearth Village Estates, has received a letter from the Acquisitions Systems Company of America claiming adverse possession of a plot of land that runs through both men's condos. A quick runaround with Victor Person, Esq., suggests that some unspecified ritual (the ``livery of CÇzanne''?) performed that Halloween night may be the only way to keep Acquisitions Systems and its mysterious nuncio, Big Adcox, at bay. Rousing himself from his guilty flirtation with Iranian graduate assistant Shubi Behedji, Mark joins Roger in his vigil on the property line, discovering gradually that the threat of an appearance by Big Adcox pales beside sweet- tempered Roger's problems with the condo corporation—which wants to evict him for nonpayment of his mortgage—and with his aspiring anesthesiologist ex-wife Dot, who's sworn out a complaint against him. Linking fashionable deconstructive attacks on the existence of the physical universe to Big Adcox's remark that ``all claims of property originate in a hallucination,'' Jones takes Mark through a bumpy, understated series of domestic adventures that confirm his faith in the logical errors that keep his assumptions about property, love, and physical existence afloat. Whimsical, grave, and a lot more stylized in its plot and its cast of weirdos than Jones's equally charming first novel, Ordinary Money (1990). An elementary background in theoretical physics, while not required, would be helpful.
Pub Date: April 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-679-42285-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1993
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
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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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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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