The rare one-joke book that never gets old, with a pleasingly tangy aftertaste.
As heard on This American Life, here’s a little something for any who’ve ever had a “friend” whose amazing life made their own seem pathetic.
Set up as a one-way conversation, with the protagonist never heard but always painfully felt, the story takes some generationally specific insecurities and spins them into a novel about growing up in the 1990s and never getting anywhere. The never-heard-from victim is a woman graduating from Clarkwell College in 1990 and doomed to make a career out of a degree in Folk & Myth, only to be subjected to a series of interactions over the following years with the titular Underminer, a diabolically manipulative “best friend” who’s always there to remind the victim just how ludicrous her life is, though she’s never without a smile on her face. Underminer reminds the victim of her relationship missteps (“they were really close all through freshman year before you grabbed him I mean pinned him down I mean started dating him”), fashion miscues, personal hygiene problems (“Did you throw up? No, no I just smelled throw-up for a second”) and weight issues (“You look sexy the way your body looks now. You’re not too fat”). The dialogue rolls forward through 15 years, the victim bumping into the Underminer at every passing cultural signpost (indie filmmaking, Burning Man, Internet dating), always half a step behind and terminally clueless. Her friends all go on to bigger and better things while her band comes to naught, her poetry doesn’t pan out, and before long she’s a cater-waiter at glamorous parties the Underminer is almost too cool to attend. Comic monologist and fiction author Albo (Hornito, not reviewed) and Heffernan, Albo’s co-writer and TV critic for the New York Times, skillfully mine the slacker generation’s insecurity—with its need to be in on the next big thing without appearing to care—and add a spicy dash of psychological tension as the Underminer cheerfully chips away at every facet of the victim’s desires and achievements until little is left. Yet funny.
The rare one-joke book that never gets old, with a pleasingly tangy aftertaste.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2005
ISBN: 1-58234-484-1
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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