An attempt at a sub-subgenre of clit lit where women hate being women but love women and hate them at the same time. But it...
Veteran punkrocker Breedlove debuts in print with the story of—surprise—a punkrocker looking for love but finding only sex in a sub-America chock-full of “hags.”
“Jim” is a lesbian punkrocker and a druggie bike messenger in San Francisco. She’s “a regular Major Tom, an Annie Oakley who rides all day and shoots all night.” We follow her here through apparently random and inconsequential events, drug-trips, happenstance encounters with people who have names like Eurobabe, Diamonds, Ally Cat, Pez, Smash, Devastaysha, and The Despondent One. These encounters trigger memories that are just as random and happenstance but that detail Jim’s life as that of a person is far more confident and far less confused than she ought to be. She watches friends turn tricks, delivers lots of unprompted drug-shooting advice, visits her own rundown flat, recounts her latest run-in with the police, dreams about being a man, has a number of affairs with fellow hags, dumpster dines, has a lip pierced, and eventually travels cross-country with a band called Hostile Mucous, driving with the group to LA, New Orleans, Florida, New England, and New York for lots more sex in bathrooms, ever more speed trips, and the occasional riff on love in a modern America. Breedlove writes with the glee of a child giddy over seeing her face on the screen or her name in print; it’s literature as a game of dress-up. She is actually best at the simple, quiet, yet harrowing moments of life that she actively avoids in favor of hackneyed drug pyrotechnics. What emerges is an anti-story whose main riddle is whether what is happening is actually happening or whether it’s all an orgiastic drug fantasy that devalues the plot we non-hags are suspected of craving.
An attempt at a sub-subgenre of clit lit where women hate being women but love women and hate them at the same time. But it won’t work until it gets real.Pub Date: April 10, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-28680-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2002
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
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
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