paper 0-87451-878-4 This prizewinning first volume, selected by Garrett Hongo, embraces its own rudeness: an admitted —narcissistic 90’s beatnik,— loncar avoids capital letters and favors no conventional punctuation. His jump-cutting style hops from image to image, creating a collage of incidents and things drawn from a hyped-up world of —post modern tv scrap culture.— Breathless allusions to road movies punctuate free-flowing narratives about a boy, a girl, and a car: in an America of —evangelists and mass murderers and movie stars,— they hurtle from motel to motel, coffee-fueled, sleepless, and grateful for jukeboxes full of Patsy Cline. At times boozy and bluesy, loncar’s short-short poems risk glibness, when they—re not pared down to incoherence. The road narrative culminates in a tragic crash, and sexy Angelina (a soft-porn Garbo)dies—the whole event re-created typographically (and unclearly) in —postscript: landscape with car crash.— —Wallace P. Hipslit, age nine— nicely changes pace with a portrait of a young boy on a swing trying to impress a girl—the poem neatly re-creating the boy’s rhythmic motions. But loncar’s aesthetic better shows itself in the longish —the king of refrigerator poems,— full of all sorts of posturings and boasts: he’s a —poetic hard ass,— with —a willingness to fuck with any/margin foolish enough to come within yards/of me.— Though he imagines himself a threat to the —fascist neo-/formalist— poets, loncar undercuts his own poetic and political conceits with much inspired self-effacement—but even that develops into another tiresome pose.
Pub Date: Aug. 7, 1998
ISBN: 0-87451-877-6
Page Count: 64
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1998
I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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
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