An intense book for those who love a literary puzzle—difficult to read but equally difficult to forget.
A motley assemblage of oddballs, frat boys, and pharmacological explorers delve deeply into love, sex, drugs, and philosophy in this debut novel.
Ostensibly, this novel tells the story of Stranger, a lovesick, drunken, acid-freak college student, but author Schmeling takes the device of interior monologue to a new level, continually escaping the confines of simple narrative in the service of puns, wordplay, ontology, epistemology, name-dropping, polemics, and all-out, guns-blazing alliteration: “The film flickered in flits and flashes of fabulous light.” As a big-man-on-campus fraternity brother, Stranger swaggers appropriately, but he’s really using alcohol, sex (he admits that he’s never had sex sober), drugs, and Homeric bull sessions with fellow misfits Jester, Dudemeister, and Variable to mask his innate insecurity and anxiety. He lives in a generic frat house at an unnamed school, where people continually come and go, absorbing booze, psychedelics, and assorted other drugs—sometimes passing out, sometimes vomiting. All the while, the characters hold forth on topics from the intellectual to the inane before exiting to carry on their merry-prankster existences elsewhere. Stranger is shown to be ambivalent about his place in the world, partially due to the fact that he comes from a mixed-race background. His love for Gunny, a woman with a fragile psyche who’s involved with another man, develops as the two find that they can honestly communicate with each other. Gunny reveals to Stranger that she cuts herself, and after a good deal of procrastination, he reveals his feelings for her. For Gunny, however, the relationship will always be platonic, which causes Stranger to vacillate between hostility and submissiveness. Readers will need to break out their dictionaries, Who’s Whos, books on history, philosophy, and political science, and any other reference materials they can get their hands on for this dense, stream-of-consciousness, James Joyce–meets–William S. Burroughs roller-coaster ride. There isn’t much plot, but like Honoré de Balzac, Schmeling seems to know everything there is to know about every subject he touches on; he has no trouble expounding at length on diverse fields from anthropology to zoology. His digressions, which effectively comprise the bulk of the book, sound off on a wide range of subjects, including popular music, race relations, Trumpism, romantic love, animal rights, economics, drug use, and the far reaches of the multiverse. The author’s way with words is witty, wild, subtle, and sonorous, with nearly every sentence seeming to blast references like shrapnel in all directions. His numerous bons mots are clever and insightful: “Secrets. We tell them when we have the feeling someone already knows.” Schmeling makes skillful use of allusion, as in this biblical reference: “whole crowds devouring red herrings and loaves, but return to the people what is the people’s.” He also uses offbeat literary devices, including an interesting trick to emphasize his words and slow his readers down: “That. She. Accused. One. Of. The. Warrior’s. Brothers. Too. Maybe. He. Did. It.”
An intense book for those who love a literary puzzle—difficult to read but equally difficult to forget.Pub Date: July 30, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-387-11645-4
Page Count: 442
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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