Freiner pushes his protagonist toward insights that he never quite realizes in this relentless survey of eroticism and drug...
A young addict chronicles his struggles with cocaine, alcohol, and especially sex in this debut novel in stories.
In the letter that opens this book, M., the narrator, pleads with a past lover, L., to “find this collection of short stories from my life as my sincere attempt to explain who you really lived with for more than ten years.” It’s a project that may be as important to M. as it is to his addressee, to whom he admits, “I don’t know why I almost shot you that night.” The stories are all linked by M.’s recollections of his idealization of and callousness toward women. As the book moves deeper into his past, details of M.’s faith and city provide additional context. Author Freiner refreshingly mixes up the usual beats of addiction narratives, beginning with M.’s successful attempt to get sober in the first full story, “Evil Eyes,” which chronicles his redemptive affair with the daughter of a woman whose sadism catches him off guard. The tales also have moments of droll humor; for example, as M. prepares for his first confession while in the throes of sexual awakening in “The Saint Sisters,” he reads a catalog of sins and notes that “the Catholic Church was a very detail-oriented organization.” M. is portrayed as a lively but repetitive narrator; he explains his categorization of women as “possible mothers of my future kids” or “sluts” at least twice in the collection, for instance. He also has a maddeningly muted sense of agency throughout, reporting that he feels “disconnected from my body” during a tryst and that a “mysterious power” leads him to pick one woman over another. He doesn’t seem to understand why he does things or even comprehend how disturbing his actions are, whether he’s threatening to kill African-Americans in chat rooms or concocting a scheme to seduce a 14-year-old girl—which raises questions about what readers are supposed to take away from this collection.
Freiner pushes his protagonist toward insights that he never quite realizes in this relentless survey of eroticism and drug abuse.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-692-76618-7
Page Count: 262
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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