A rambunctious fictionalized autobiography (originally published in 1977 in England) about the life of a 20th-century American tycoon. Episodic and lively, the novel has a great deal of fun with its subject but finally turns a grotesque figure into a touching (if not quite poignant) version of Falstaff—instinct- driven, hypocritical, but life-affirming. Tornado Pratt lives up to his first name. Pratt, purportedly telling his life history to Horace (who, we learn later, is an illegitimate son), is dying in a hotel as he remembers his life, sometimes chronologically, sometimes helter-skelter, in a brash, cocky voice that has enough range to entertain the big questions from time to time. Pratt, born in Kansas, leaves home at 16 to find his fortune, first in the Marines, then in Chicago, where he soon has the second-largest meat-packing operation in the city (``Don't ask me how I did it, Horace, because I can't tell you. All I know is I never put a foot wrong''). The rest of the story displays Pratt's consuming zest for life through good times and bad. Pratt lives through his share of lust and violence in Chicago, including an odd encounter with a ``perverted little gunman'' who thinks he's gay; travels to Europe and to England; and marries Nathalie, a peer's daughter. He calls her his great love and bemoans her horrifying death from cancer, but Ableman deftly allows the narrative to unpeel Pratt's voracious infidelity and dramatize his nature—an authentic hunger that takes him piecemeal and slapdash through the world he wants to grasp and understand. Britisher Ableman creates a plausible, complex representative of America. If he lacks Bellow's grasp of the grit of American character, he makes up for it by giving Pratt an appetite as large as Bellow's Henderson. Fine entertainment.
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1992
ISBN: 0-929701-25-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1992
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 presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
PERSPECTIVES
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