An intriguing, frequently affecting experiment that challenges its readers to think anew about sharpening and refracting...
Coming-of-age along the weirder edges of late-20th-century America is evoked through a montage of gritty, frequently bizarre tales spinning obliquely off cult and classic movies.
If you were to read a story about a man who leaves his family to marry one of a dozen eggs he buys at a grocery store (yes, you read it right the first time), would it occur to you to somehow connect this to the 1983 science-fiction thriller Blade Runner? Assuming you’d seen the movie and given some thought to its theme, you might—or you might dismiss the connection altogether. Such challenges to memory and intellect make this novel as close to an interactive experience as reading a collection of cutting-edge short fiction can be. McGriff and Tyree take turns writing brief stories inspired by, but not directly connected to, the same movies. Some links are easier to make than others: The railroad-tracks riff deployed by both writers off George Washington (2000) will resonate with those who remember a principal setting of David Gordon Green’s haunting reverie of childhoods at risk, while On the Waterfront (1954) inspires one of the writers (there are no bylines) to take a surrealistic stroll along the docks while the other takes off after someone who ratted him out. But after a while, it doesn’t matter how you match your memories of the movies with theirs or whether you’ve seen all of them. Because what emerges from these sometimes-opaque, often strikingly realistic sketches is a portrait of suburban or rural youth from the 1980s to the present day; “linked snapshots,” as the authors’ introduction aptly puts it, “chronicling our parallel trajectories as the last children of the Cold War.”
An intriguing, frequently affecting experiment that challenges its readers to think anew about sharpening and refracting their memories of both life and art.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-9892759-6-5
Page Count: 168
Publisher: A Strange Object
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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
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