A compellingly readable contemporary fantasia set in a vivid New York of the mind.
A novel follows a man and a woman in the wilderness of New York City.
The two main characters in this tale, John Bunyan and Felicity Fawkler, first meet at the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park in 2009. She’s an expat Brit of ancient lineage (she tells readers that her family “almost had a stitch in the Bayeux Tapestry”), or as John puts it, “Church of England, slender, little beanpole, waxy pallor of a holy relic, blush of a broken nose, cupid bow lips, preternatural and possibly, yes probably, possessed.” John himself is a hipster-style, fedora-wearing, struggling writer with a passion for the wilderness and a fascination with the animal dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History. John’s father is an antiquarian art dealer specializing in maps and medieval texts. Felicity becomes drawn to John immediately, despite the shadowy presence in his life of another woman, named Willow, a lonely and troubled soul whose childhood diaries readers sometimes peruse—they describe her grandfather’s friend Broady as a cryptozoologist. She hears stories of “Fearsome Critters” like the mangrove killfish, the snalygaster, and so on. (Broady asks the 9-year-old Willow: “I thought everyone knew what a Fillyloo is?”) Canterel (The Jolly Coroner, 2016) weaves together the stories of John and Felicity with a good deal of skill at handling the very elliptical nature of his narrative, which shifts viewpoint and time frame in a series of strange, surrealist moves. Through it all run two constants: the great wildlife guide John is composing and New York, a location Canterel adroitly reimagines as a sprawling wonderland in which anything is possible. “Even you, John, would agree that New York is a strange place at five in the morning,” John muses in a typical observation. “It’s almost as if the place shouldn’t exist. It is a city between two worlds.” As his slightly manic plot unfolds, Canterel deftly builds tension around John’s relationship with the enigmatic Willow, leading to long-telegraphed revelations at the book’s end.
A compellingly readable contemporary fantasia set in a vivid New York of the mind.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-911079-47-7
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Acorn Independent Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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