A highly creative, if meandering, adventure.
Debut author Canterel offers a surreal novel about an unlikely coroner.
Welcome to the city of Hokum. Although it’s ostensibly modern, in parts, it’s also a place “dotted with the typical gothic horrors and irredeemable folklore of many small southern cities.” It’s subsumed by invasive kudzu and a population of Mexican workers from “the nearby alfalfa plantations.” The city’s coroner, a philosophical, heavyset, hard-drinking man named Billy Rubino, is an antihero if there ever was one. As he investigates the possible murder of a man at a local motel that’s known for gay hookups (where “The hallways rang with deep moans of ecstasy at all hours of the day or night”), he finds himself at odds with his colleagues. They insist that he rule out foul play to simplify the case, but he feels uneasy about such a hasty conclusion. Meanwhile, a Polish man named Basyli, who’s erroneously been declared dead due to an identification mix-up, pleads with Billy for help to escape his state of nonexistence. The book’s drug use, obscure classical music references, and assortment of local weirdos depict Hokum as alternately surreal and vulgar (“you could no longer walk under a bridge downtown without the fetor of human urine”). The story is part David Lynch, part comedy of errors, and readers will never quite know what will happen next. The scenes are loaded with surprises; however, they tend to overflow with excessive detail, which may frustrate some readers. Little is left to the imagination, allowing for vivid, if overdrawn, descriptions of such things as teeth and hands (“coriaceous hands resembled gorilla’s paws”). Nevertheless, as the plot becomes stranger, the fate of Billy and the town he serves remain very much up for grabs.
A highly creative, if meandering, adventure.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-909122-81-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Acorn Independent Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 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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