An ambitious novel that may appeal most to adult readers looking back on their high-school experiences.
A coming-of-age novel about five high school friends’ junior year in gritty 1950s Detroit.
Debut novelist Wlodkowski doesn’t tell the boys’ story chronologically but in vignettes arranged around themes such as “Romance” and “Fear and Courage.” The first introduces the five boys and how they got their nicknames: Lightning, Horsehair, Third Grade, the Bush and Flyer. (Flyer is the narrator, but, oddly, readers learn the least about him.) Each chapter starts with Flyer looking back, addressing the reader from an unspecified future time. Teenage readers may relate to some of the dialogue: “We weren’t supposed to fall in love, at least not like adults do….Just a fling…not something that could bury us or warp us for the rest of our lives. Well, that was royal BS.” The opening of the chapter “Oblong Ball”, however, may put off readers who don’t like sports: “Like the American old west, football offers young men one of the few frontiers in which primitive rituals can be undertaken to test one’s courage.” Throughout, the five teens experience team sports, disagreements with each other, drunkenness, turf wars and sex with girls. Horsehair’s mother dies, and the Bush struggles with a potential stepfather. Wlodkowski’s dialogue is often believable but sometimes a bit stilted, as when the profanity-prone Lightning says, “I think the time has come for some action between me and Barbara Bayer….she’s looking even better this year than last.” Although some plot threads progress from chapter to chapter, the thematic organization of the novel weakens the overall story arc. That said, the novel does effectively illustrate Flyer’s final observation that “friends stay with us and continue to create us beyond any moment or place in time.”
An ambitious novel that may appeal most to adult readers looking back on their high-school experiences.Pub Date: April 11, 2013
ISBN: 978-1481131230
Page Count: 166
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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