A rollicking, good-spirited ride that’s weakened by the weight of its ambition.
A collection of tall tales linked together by an ageless traveler.
Debut author Sevush leads readers on an imaginative tour of pulp genres and popular mythology. It begins with a pithy potboiler of a tale, “Emmett, Joey, & the Beelz,” about a drug addict, Joey Low, who may have crossed the wrong gangster, known as “the Beelz,” who he fears has marked him for vengeance. Alternatively, he may be in the final stages of a centurieslong bargain struck between a 16th-century rabbi named Judah Loewe and a divine being named Bezalel in order to rein in the terror of the Golem of Prague. Supernatural reality and heroin hallucination are granted equal plausibility in Sevush’s opening gambit, and he enjoys teasing similar balances throughout the book. For instance, “Goat-man,” the narrator of the second story, “La Joie de Vivre, or, Picasso & the Satyr,” wonders whether he’s really receiving a visit from a being called Faunus while drinking in a Paris cafe in the 1960s: “Hah,” he thinks. “Nothing more than my wine-addled mind turned in upon itself.” The collection’s central trope is revealed when the narrator is shown to be Joseph (aka Joey or Judah), a journeyman existing beyond time and place. The character thenceforth serves as the reader’s guide through journeys to the Old West, World War II–era Japan, and even a robot mining colony on a distant planet. Each episode makes intimations of cosmic significance, and Sevush concludes his compendium with a take on Arthurian legend in which Joseph becomes a vessel for unleashing ancient gods. This last, however, serves as the best example of the collection’s consistent problem: huge scope but limited space. Overall, these stories are grand, worldbuilding genre pieces condensed into a few pages each, and Sevush displays great facility with the rhythm and lexicon of the various styles he assays. However, the economy of style flattens the narrative as a whole, as it relegates each story to being an homage rather than a serious addition to the canon. Furthermore, Joseph’s involvement in some tales is often little more than a fictional editor’s note or introductory letter, making this framing device seem like an attempt to link unrelated stories that once existed discretely.
A rollicking, good-spirited ride that’s weakened by the weight of its ambition.Pub Date: June 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-692-73851-1
Page Count: 176
Publisher: taQ'Lut Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2017
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 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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