Kurtzman’s debut novel traces the evolution of a wary first-year medical student who becomes chief resident at a busy city hospital.
Many may believe the making of a doctor to be a tedious endeavor, but this notion will be quickly dispelled when readers become acquainted with Richard Grollman, an eccentric doctor-to-be with an affinity for opera. With wit and dark humor, Kurtzman’s descriptive dose of the day-to-day life of a medical student in the late 1950s details the challenges and rewards of the entire process. As Grollman progresses through his eight years of training, he experiences a number of trials and tribulations while surrounded by a cast of crazy surgeons and bumbling interns, before eventually discovering that he’s learned more than procedure and bedside manner. In his final act as chief medical resident, Grollman expounds upon his epiphany with his trademark cynicism: “Medicine is an elaborate masquerade in which the doctors pretend to cure while the patients pretend to get better.... Surgery is no more complicated than automobile repair and requires no more talent or ability. Knowing what to do and when to do it, or more importantly, when not to do it, is what counts.” By the novel’s conclusion, Kurtzman has presented readers with a thorough examination of the art of medicine and more than a few may be left pondering whether sometimes doing nothing may in fact be the best remedy. Although a familiarity with the medical field will engender a stronger connection to Kurztman’s work, it is not required. The book could benefit from another round of editing for brevity and excessively flowery language without detracting from its strengths: a zany point of view and black humor. Holds its own alongside Samuel Shem’s The House of God, a highly regarded take on the life and times of medical students.
Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-1461096535
Page Count: 708
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2012
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
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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