Despite a slight relaxation of comic tension at the close, a wonderfully intelligent, generously imagined, skillfully...
Many funny moments and a beguiling cast of bona fide English eccentrics adorn this charming picaresque coming-of-ager – the fictional debut of veteran novelist Paul Theroux’s son.
The story chronicles Horace Littlefair’s passage from the delightfully deranged provincial village of Great Much up to London to begin employment with the nondescript newspaper (the South London Bugle) that’s owned and operated by his hustling, social-climbing uncle Derwent Boothby. Theroux sets the plot aboil quickly, shifting his focus from the helpless Horace (who’s immediately victimized by a predatory cabdriver) to such prominent secondary characters as phlegmatic landlord Ugandan Mr. Narayan; centenarian Agnes Kettle (the subject of Horace’s first in-person interview); and unlikely best pal Trevor Diamond, a passionate environmentalist dedicated to saving “the urban fox” from public opprobrium and extinction. The ineffably good-natured and game Horace is a perfect foil in an interlocking series of misadventures that begins when he inadvertently causes the deportation of a Polish shop girl who had caught his fancy, picks up steam when a randy MP (Barnaby Colefax) is caught in flagrante with an accommodating prostitute, and climaxes when the mystery of whether Horace is indeed “the grandson of a famous communist” coincides hilariously with an “anti-quarantine rally” organized to save the foxes and put the duplicitous Barnaby firmly in his place. Without laboring the point, Theroux draws an amusing, touching parallel between the endangered foxes and the almost preternaturally innocent Horace (who is, incidentally and happily, no match for any of the several resourceful and forthright women here).
Despite a slight relaxation of comic tension at the close, a wonderfully intelligent, generously imagined, skillfully executed debut. If its occasionally Waspish observations of human folly bring to mind both Evelyn Waugh and Theroux père, its infectious enthusiasm and warmth announce the appearance of a gifted young writer very much his own man.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-15-100408-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1999
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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