Writing for the fun of writing. A treat for the reader.
Two novellas from the big heart of an American original—one about time and music, the other a riff on Moby-Dick.
Still active, curious and writing in his ninth decade, Bradbury (Farewell Summer, 2006, etc.) does a little desk cleaning, finishing up a story that’s nagged at him for years and having another stab at a sci-fi version of Moby-Dick first written for radio following his screenplay for the midcentury John Huston film. The first novella, Somewhere a Band is Playing, was inspired by a Jerry Goldsmith movie theme with which Bradbury was so taken that he went home and wrote lyrics for it, snatches of which turn up here. An early 20th-century Chicago reporter, James Cardiff, responds to a song heard in a dream by taking a train to Arizona, alighting at Summerton, a Brigadoonish town scheduled to be wiped off the map by highway engineers. He’s met by an amiable stationmaster who delivers him in a horse-drawn wagon to a beautiful small hotel full of intoxicating kitchen smells and peopled by amiable immortals. Cardiff’s wanderings through the town follow the route of a friendly delivery horse and lead him to the arms of Nefertiti, another immortal, beautiful and wise, whose invitation to join the club sets his head spinning. Will he accept? It doesn’t really matter. The pleasure here is writing that sounds like Aaron Copland’s music written for Our Town, and it is pleasant indeed. In Leviathan ’99, Ishmael Jones signs on as crew for a rocket set for a mapping and exploration mission. His Queequegish berthmate is Quell, a huge telepathic spider with whom he quickly bonds. Following Melville’s template, the captain has his own mission, to capture Leviathan, the comet that blinded him years ago and which is now on a trajectory that will bring it perilously close to earth. Astronomy being more exact than 19th-century marine navigation, things come quickly to a head.
Writing for the fun of writing. A treat for the reader.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 0061131571
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2007
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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