A challenging, worthwhile account of the workings of the mind amid the contemplation of art and beauty.
Horrigan (Widescreen Dreams, 2001) sets his debut novel at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, where the central character, Robin, slowly travels through an exhibition titled “Motions of the Mind: The Renaissance Portrait and Its Legacy.”
Robin is a troubled young man dealing with the end of a relationship, the death of a close relative, and an unfinished doctoral degree. More pointedly, he tries to process the guilt and fear he feels after many incidents of unsafe sexual practices, including one from the previous night. Horrigan provides a floor plan of the gallery as well as reproductions of the five paintings on display that most capture Robin’s interest. Along with the helpful section “Acknowledgements and Notes on Sources” at the end of the book, these inclusions allow readers to orient themselves, spatially and otherwise, and to pursue further investigation if desired. About midway through the gallery, Robin encounters Bernard, a middle-aged therapist and former monk, and each studiously measures the degree of his attraction to the other. Curiously, they come to diametrically opposed conclusions about the essential relationship among artist, subject, and viewer. One particular mental note made by Bernard lies at the heart of the novel: “The drama depicted within the paintings, the drama which inspired them and went into their making so long ago—these were all part of the drama that included everything going on here and now in front of the paintings.” The author uses different typefaces to represent each of the multiple voices and points of view: artist, subject, viewer, critic, security guard, narrator, wall text, etc. Although the technique may seem daunting at the outset of each chapter, this cacophony of sorts becomes clearer. Horrigan tackles issues often associated with the gay community, but he also addresses the broader notion of how we interpret faces, bodies, and behaviors through keen observation.
A challenging, worthwhile account of the workings of the mind amid the contemplation of art and beauty.Pub Date: May 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-1590214770
Page Count: -
Publisher: Lethe Press
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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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