Classic Leyner insanity, a delight for his fans but unlikely to win any new ones.
The poet laureate of the MTV generation (Tooth Imprints on a Corn Dog, 1995, etc.) tries to spread his wings wider with his "first 100 percent BONA FIDE NOVEL—story, characters, everything!''
How well he succeeds is a question that depends on where the reader falls on the postmodern scale. Our narrator is 13-year-old Mark Leyner, who has a heavy cloud hanging over him from the start. No, not his imprisoned father's impending execution, which he's about to witness, but an overdue paper (or, rather, screenplay) that he hasn't even started writing. It seems that Mark is in the running for the Vincent and Lenore DiGiacomo/Oshimitsu Polymers America Award, which is bestowed every year at Maplewood Junior High School and provides an annual stipend of $250,000 for life. Naturally, Mark finds it hard to concentrate on his father's impending demise, which is just as well, really, since after receiving three massive lethal injections Mr. Leyner remains perfectly alive and subsequently is resentenced to New Jersey State Discretionary Execution (don't ask) and released on Mark's recognizance. At this point Mark decides to pull an all- nighter to complete the screenplay, although the nymphomaniac female warden distracts him long enough to make him rethink the whole concept, which was never terribly clear in his head to begin with. While Leyner tries to fit his usual wild ramblings ("My mom's buttocks were tattooed with an illustration of an 1,800-pound Red Brindle bull crashing through the front window of a Starbuck's coffee bar and charging a guy who's sitting there sipping a cappuccino and reading M. Scott Peck's The Road Less Traveled'') into something resembling a story, the effect is the same comic collage that made him his name in earlier work—and no one who loved or hated him then will feel much different now.
Classic Leyner insanity, a delight for his fans but unlikely to win any new ones.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-517-70101-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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