An entertaining picaresque that mixes higher education and sports in hilariously inappropriate ways.
A put-upon academic copes with feuding jocks, corrupt professors, randy students, and an even randier wife in this comic novel.
As a middle-aged English professor at subpar California State University, Malcolm Wade toils thanklessly to improve his classes’ semiliterate writing while occasionally fending off propositions from bosomy students seeking better grades. His sideline as counselor to the school’s athletes is more dramatic—and gratifying to his sports obsession. He gets to mentor baseball/football phenom Juke Jackson but also has to clean up a tangle of jealous betrayals and rape accusations involving the player, his girlfriend, and a teammate. Complicating Wade’s job is an African-American history professor whose low academic standards—jocks get automatic A’s—threaten CSU’s accreditation. When Wade challenges her, she graphically belittles his manhood and cries racism (even though she is secretly white). At home, Wade’s wife, Angela, a gorgeous nympho who is also his dean, flummoxes him by announcing that she wants to adopt a child and then reveals that her ex-boyfriend is blackmailing her with a sex tape. In this third installment of Wade’s misadventures, Hutcheon (Desperation Passes, 2015, etc.), a film and writing professor at Delta College, stuffs a meandering, episodic narrative with off-the-wall situations, lurid characters, and punchy, gleefully scabrous dialogue. (Sample marital exchange: “Are you coming in, or are you just going to stand out there twiddling your dick?”) The result is a sometimes-cynical, sometimes-affectionate spoof of academe that’s masculinized with locker-room bawdiness. (When his oral ministrations fall short, Angela rebuffs Wade “like a pitcher being pulled from the game.”) The author writes with skill and brio but sometimes offers readers too much. Scenes can drag on just to showcase the jokey repartee, and the professor in him veers off on didactic tangents about everything from cancer awareness (“Half of the men in America don’t even know what a prostate is until their own tries to kill them”) to the plight of returning veterans (“After all they’ve been through in Afghanistan or Iraq, do we care enough to make sure they can make a decent living here?”). Still, the nebbishy but subversively funny Wade makes an endearing ringmaster for this rollicking collegiate circus.
An entertaining picaresque that mixes higher education and sports in hilariously inappropriate ways.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62901-514-9
Page Count: 404
Publisher: Inkwater Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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