Bestselling Bronson's (Bombardiers, 1995) stab at capturing and conveying the high-tech angsts and ecstasies of California's Santa Clara (a.k.a. Silicon) Valley comes off as less a novel than a preachy, populist allegory. Despite a place on the payroll at La Honda Research Center, Andy Caspar is discontented. The Stanford grad is doing scut work while fellow engineers are advancing the state of broadcast, computer, networking, semiconductor, and telecommunications media for the West Coast electronics enterprises that fund the prestigious nonprofit institution. Rejected by the legendary Francis Benoit for a high-profile chip program, Andy winds up heading a dead-end project whose stated objective is to develop a personal computer that can retail for $300 or less. No shirker, Andy recruits some assistants and gets cracking. When word leaks out that the outcasts' efforts could bear fruit, an influential sponsor (less than eager to encourage low-end competition) lays down the law. Effectively cut adrift, Andy & Co. (who have devised a universal program that can afford speedy access to the Internet's data streams) go in search of venture capital. The only willing source of financing they can find, however, is a sleazy accountant. Desperate, they accept his hard bargain (which costs them control of the company) and learn that their angel is fronting for the duplicitous Benoit. Andy fights back, consigning a recoded version of his brainchild to the public domain and thwarting the best-laid plans of the villains for a megabuck public stock offering. At the close, Mr. Integrity and two of his three original colleagues are gainfully employed at a for-profit concern morally committed to making and marketing low-priced hardware and all-purpose software. Not without a few bright spots, but Louis B. Mayer was right: In most cases, messages are best left to Western Union. (Author tour)
Pub Date: March 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-45699-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1996
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 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
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