by Peter Conrad ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 1992
An overwrought and highly precious first novel by the Oxford don and essayist whose previous works (Where I Fell to Earth, 1990, etc.) displayed a rather florid imagination reluctantly reined in. Here, he pulls out all the stops. On the edge of an unnamed city at an unimaginable future date, gangs of outcasts and criminals live in a desolate valley, where they traffic in stolen goods and prey upon such unfortunate commuters who wander in by mistake. One of these, a prosperous and rather obnoxious businessman, is robbed, killed, and dismembered by a pack of hooligans who wrap the severed head in a bundle and play football with it. The crime is witnessed by Wilf, a local boy who subsequently flees into the city, where he is adopted by Kate, an artist who is drawn to the valley by the same violence and desperation that drove Wilf away. Kate's boyfriend, Paul, is an architect who dreams of creating a new city in the valley, and the two prevail upon Wilf to bring them into a world that he was only too happy to abandon. A deranged Jehovah's Witness, a sadistic thief with chronic indigestion, a gasworks whose perpetual flames illumine the valley at night, and a subterranean tunnel that is the locus of much misfortune are a few of the more obvious elements of this tale, in which the allegory is laid on with a trowel. The pity of it all is that Conrad's prose is lucid and engaging enough to make coherence of theme and progression of narrative seem unnecessary luxuries—for a spell. But the aimlessness of the story eventually becomes an aggravation. Pointless and artificial: the characters and situations are contrived in the extreme and entirely unconvincing. Too many points are being made with too little finesse by a narrator whose tone throughout is far more academic than imaginative.
Pub Date: May 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-75884-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1992
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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