A novel in stories that oscillates between ordinariness and brilliance.
In Ihejirika’s multifaceted debut novel, the death of a dictator shakes up the denizens of an apartment complex in Lagos, Nigeria.
It’s June 1998, and Sani Abacha, the “dark-goggled” leader of Nigeria’s military dictatorship, has died. That event has consequences for the inhabitants of the apartments at 1998 New Nigeria Road. They represent the diverse ethnic, religious and economic groups within their country and have either benefited or suffered under Abacha’s regime. Now, these businessmen, criminals, students, servants, spouses and mistresses must each evaluate the personal ramifications of the power shift as democracy threatens to overturn the status quo. As eight narrators tell their tales of survival in a corrupt system, readers are treated to the recent history of Africa’s most populous nation. The stories focus on the trials of attempting to do right by one’s people, one’s family and oneself. In one tale, a pimp of high-end escorts wonders if the incoming government’s ministers will have the same taste for companionship as those of the old. In another, a conflicted public relations wizard, thrilled at the promise of a new order, may have to flee the country because of the work he did for the previous one. Ihejirika masterfully presents the complex systems of patronage, exploitation and outright theft that exist at all levels of society. He illustrates his characters’ harsh pragmatism with sympathetic exactness even as he continually reminds readers of the idealism that lies dormant within them. The prose does have a distracting fondness for American idioms, and earlier chapters sometimes feel bogged down by exposition. The casual style of narration also works against the tension of some storylines. Ihejirika often relies on concluding twists to illuminate his chapters, which yields moments that are either wonderful or predictable. At his best, however, he presents characters of moral complexity that are suited to their times and suggests that they can only begin to evolve when confronted with the startling fact that their system is moving on without them.
A novel in stories that oscillates between ordinariness and brilliance.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1460244951
Page Count: 280
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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