A lightweight, entertaining Broadway yarn.
A young New York actor finds his life imitating his art in this gay theater romance.
Mason Burroughs, an insecure, pudgy, 25-year-old actor, struggles for bit parts in Manhattan. The only bright spot in his life is his relationship with live-in boyfriend Eric, a nice video game programmer. Through luck and connections, Mason lands the second lead in a Broadway period piece called Masque, featuring Elizabethan palace intrigue, knife play, lengthy dying soliloquies, and a hot-and-heavy bisexual love triangle. Playing the seductive Count Ezio to Mason’s ingénue soldier Caleb is Kevin Caldwell, a gorgeous, charming, selfish actor whom Mason had a fierce, unrequited crush on years ago and with whom he will now have to play a climactic nudish sex scene. Adding to the pressure are an obnoxious understudy who looks exactly like Mason and has obvious designs on his part and Kevin’s body; a stern personal trainer who gets Mason in shape with man-killing workouts and revolting organic teas; and an imperious director who puts Mason through bizarre nude theater exercises. (There is a lot of nudity in the book, not all of it germane to character development.) Mason sheds pounds and adds muscle, builds his acting chops, and spends rehearsals making out with Kevin onstage—and finds his erstwhile lust now earnestly returned. Will he dump poor Eric and succumb to the rakish Kevin like Caleb swooning for Ezio? The steamy debut novel adds an overlay of confused identity to what is essentially a fantasia, with a Cinderella makeover swirling Mason into the limelight and the affections of a previously unattainable hunk; it’s sprightly but not too deep. Mason himself is not a compelling protagonist and his relationship with Eric feels dull and bickery. Kevin, an Adonis with intriguing hidden wounds, is the more captivating and actually less narcissistic figure, and there’s a splendid supporting cast of colorful, well-drawn secondary characters. The play-within-the novel delivers an absurd plot and bad dialogue (“My liege, I have been sent from the fronts of battle, to deliver unto you, this message”), but the book offers absorbing, lively procedures, from line-reading and note-dispensing to costume-fitting and investor-schmoozing. Pearson is a fluent writer, and though his lead can’t really carry the production, the show around him grabs the reader’s attention.
A lightweight, entertaining Broadway yarn.Pub Date: May 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59021-518-0
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Lethe Press
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2016
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
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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