Lots of quick Brit-wit but pretty shallow.
The title says it all in this newest in spate of ultraclever British novels that have evolved from semiautobiographical weekly columns—in this case, the author’s Web site of the same name.
Thirty-eight-year-old Pel lives with his German girlfriend Ursula and their two little boys in a renovated Victorian house in a rundown neighborhood in northern England. Pel happily kills time at a completely undemanding job in the IT department of the local university library. But then his direct supervisor disappears and Pel is promoted. He soon finds himself embroiled in various intrigues inherited from his former boss: money must be paid to the Chinese mafia for supplying Asian students; bodies buried under a new university building site have to be disposed of, along with some dangerous neurotoxins; the peculiar sexual proclivities of a retiring faculty member need to be hushed up. Poor Pel never quite understands until too late how the powers that be are setting him up as fall guy. Despite its madcap silliness and broad satire, the plot is actually perfunctory, serving to showcase the real subject matter here: Pel’s relationship with Ursula. How he and she, who have been together for years, originally met remains vague, as does the reason they haven’t officially married even after bearing two children and buying a house together. What Millington, named one of Britain’s best first novelists by The Guardian, does spell out in vivid specifics is their arguing. Much of the story, which retains the episodic feel of strung-together columns, is a running commentary on the couple’s sparring about issues large and small: car keys, household chores, sex, the purchase and renovation of a new house. The contrast between their personalities adds to the frisson: Ursula, a physiotherapist, is organized and focused, perhaps pushy; Pel is disorganized, unfocused, a pushover. Neither is exactly appealing, but both have a sense of humor, and the final domestic crisis/car mishap/career meltdown is hysterically funny, if painful.
Lots of quick Brit-wit but pretty shallow.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2003
ISBN: 0-8129-6666-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2002
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
Although Heller creates with chilling efficiency the bleakness of a world largely bereft of life as we know it, he holds out...
A post-apocalyptic novel in which Hig, who only goes by this mononym, finds not only survival, but also the possibility of love.
As in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the catastrophe that has turned the world into its cataclysmic state remains unnamed, but it involves “The Blood,” a highly virulent and contagious disease that has drastically reduced the population and has turned most of the remaining survivors into grim hangers-on, fiercely protective of their limited territory. Hig lives in an abandoned airplane hangar and keeps a 1956 Cessna, which he periodically takes out to survey the harsh and formidable landscape. While on rare occasions he spots a few Mennonites, fear of “The Blood” generally keeps people at more than arm’s length. Hig has established a defensive perimeter by a large berm, competently guarded by Bangley, a terrifying friend but exactly the kind of guy you want on your side, since he can pot intruders from hundreds of yards away, and he has plenty of firepower to do it. Haunted by a voice he heard faintly on the radio, Hig takes off one day in search of fellow survivors and comes across Pops and Cima, a father and daughter who are barely eking out a living off the land by gardening and tending a few emaciated sheep. Like Bangley, Pops is laconic and doesn’t yield much, but Hig understandably finds himself attracted to Cima, the only woman for hundreds of miles and a replacement for the ache Hig feels in having lost his pregnant wife, Melissa, years before.
Although Heller creates with chilling efficiency the bleakness of a world largely bereft of life as we know it, he holds out some hope that human relationships can be redemptive.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-95994-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
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