Self-indulgent underbelly-of-life saga about two small-time crooks who weave their way from New York to Baltimore to the South before blowing each other away. Bell's saving graces—gritty texture and occasional hard-boiled stylishness—aren't enough to save this one. Macrae, our hero, likes to hang out in Battery Park with Charlie, a near-psychotic, and sidle up to yuppies with cash cards, use their cards to the limit, then drink or shoot up the proceeds before doing it again. (Macrae also carries a sketch pad with him and draws things and has a heart of gold.) The novel's first movement reaches its tedious end when Macrae takes vengeance on a pimp (who's blown away a prostitute friend) by beating him to pulp with a baseball bat. Then Macrae and Charlie hightail it in the first of dozens of stolen cars. With Porter, a black ex-con, junkie, and all-around dispenser of wisdom along for the ride, they steal guns, commit armed robberies, and generally raise hell until they reach the backcountry South, where Macrae runs into Lacy, his old girlfriend. Trouble is, Macrae doesn't get it on with Lacy, so Charlie boffs her while Macrae does chores, milks cows, looks into haying. There's more armed robbery and good-old-boy goings-on, but everything gets worked out after high-speed car chases and fireplay when Charlie tries to blow Macrae to kingdom come but gets blown away himself—just in time for Lacy and Macrae to exchange looks ``as if they were seeing each other for the first time in their lives.'' Even worse, Bell (Doctor Sleep, 1991, etc.) plagiarizes and parodies his earlier self at several turns. Readers would do better to turn to Richard Price's Clockers, and Bell would be better served if he stayed with shorter forms, where the need to compress and shape allows his considerable talent to shine.
Pub Date: May 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-15-179432-4
Page Count: 380
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1993
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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