Good fun abounds when JCOW Enterprises sets up business and Harley’s life becomes "a rough approximation of things hoped...
In Swivel, Wisconsin, a cow named Tina Turner has birthed a calf with Jesus’ image on its flank, "the standard doe-eye Lutheran hippie iteration."
Drawing small-town characters out of central casting, Perry’s tale ripples with simple-life nostalgia. Tina Turner’s owner, Harley Jackson, says, "Well, that’s trouble" after seeing the calf’s "above average stencil of the Son of God." Forty-something Harley lives alone on the remnants of his parents’ farm. Most of the land was gobbled up by an interstate highway and the machinations of developer Klute Sorenson, who learns business strategy from audiobooks like Stomp Your Way to Success: A Clodhopper Walks All Over Wall Street. Harley’s best friend, supersized Billy Tripp, a trailer-living, clog-wearing cat fancier, wisely knows there’s money to be made when folks begin "assigning meaning to coincidence." At a staff meeting over bottles of Foamy Viking beer, Billy urges reluctant Harley to cash in and finance "undevelopment" of Klute’s tacky McMansions. Then the calf is seen by Harley’s mail carrier. Believing it miraculous, she calls the Rev. Gary at the Church of the Roaring Lamb. Soon, Sloan Knight of International Talent Management jets in, because there’s "a hard horizon on long-term marketability thematics." Another fly in the ointment is Carolyn Sawchuck, former professor and current environmentalist, who survives on EarthHug tea and Little Debbie Zebra Cakes while secreting used motor oil in Swivel’s abandoned water tower. Add a tow-truck–driving, junkyard-owning widow; a techno-gadget–entranced fire chief; a Barney Fife constable; and town newcomer Mindy, a sculptwelder who breaks Harley’s heart, and it’s sure to end with a bang.
Good fun abounds when JCOW Enterprises sets up business and Harley’s life becomes "a rough approximation of things hoped for."Pub Date: May 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-228991-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
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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