In the end, Lana’s election turns out to be a minor issue in this sardonic tale of who did what to whom. The justice-for-all...
A wildly satirical story of Louisiana politics that provides enough zany characters to fill a New Orleans bayou and keep even Yankees laughing out loud.
At a meeting of the Polish American Small Businessmen's Association, David Souchecki raises the eternal question that sets this roller-coaster debut novel in motion: Where are the famous southern Polish-Americans? Soucheki's cronies at Franky and Johnny's restaurant can't think of anyone except Stanley Kowalski (quickly dismissed as “fictional”) and Lana Pulaski, a bright, sharp-tongued medical malpractice attorney whose short stature and barmaid looks have kept her out of the big leagues. Though Lana styles her hair big and wears come-hither clothes, Soucheki and his associates think she’d make the perfect candidate for state attorney general because she's both an “ambulance chaser” who looks easily corruptible and an orphaned woman who can turn out the sympathy vote. Once the starting gun has sounded, Paolini trots out one loopy, likable character after another faster than you can snap a green bean in two, each one linked to the others by so many past crimes and secrets that she makes every Louisiana parish seem to swarm with more disenfranchised connections of one big, incestuous, and underhanded political family. Even though everyone has a unique agenda, and some seem to have a unique biology, Paolini, with her deadpan absurdist's vision, manages to wrestle a dark comedy of political manners out of such diverse specimens as a diamond-toothed skeleton in a shed; the murdered Dennis Herbert and his QVC-addicted wife; a recidivist car thief/heroin addict named Crouton (pronounced like the salad ingredient); the befuddled judge Lana marries to pump up her numbers; and Bugman the exterminator.
In the end, Lana’s election turns out to be a minor issue in this sardonic tale of who did what to whom. The justice-for-all conclusion, like the rest of this lively story, surprises and satisfies.Pub Date: July 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-26235-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2000
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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