Another rehash of 60's politics—now in a debut novel by a former Deputy National Press Director for the Vietnam Moratorium, featuring, not surprisingly, the press secretary for a 1967 Washington peace march and her scary brush with the CIA. Great expectations hang heavy in the world of 60's politics as Annie O'Connor, Catholic girl gone liberal and hard-working press secretary for the Fall Offensive Against the War, attempts to woo reporters from the New York and Washington papers with wild tales of what important politicos are going to make a stand for peace at the Offensive's Labor Day march. Taken for granted by the good ol' boys of the leftist elite—including Tom Burnett, WASP princeling and head of the offensive; Ed Kapinksy, Red diaper baby and committed radical; and Reverend Tyler, a great civil-rights speaker with some nasty personal habits—Annie looks for advice and moral support from Bitsy Clark, an upper-class black activist, and Joe Pisano, an ambitious D.C. reporter, as she prays that her hints to the press that liberal Congressman Mark Mulligan will make the first public stand against Johnson's war will actually prove true. What Annie and her friends don't realize is that ugly machinations are already at work to prevent such an event from taking place- -schemes that will result in a blackmail attempt on Mulligan and in Burnett's violent death. As events transpire, Annie can hardly believe that her antigovernment paranoia is proving correct—the CIA is behind it all, in league with a frightened liberal mafia bent on controlling the growing public hysteria against the war and, if possible, the course of future foreign policy. Oates manages to convey the excitement and complexity of political warfare competently enough, but her characters remain shallow stereotypes—rendering this a largely forgettable journey into the past.
Pub Date: Oct. 10, 1991
ISBN: 0-446-51541-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1991
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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