An imaginative and soundly executed SF morality tale.
A man agrees to sell his body—literally—in exchange for a better life in this science fiction novel from Moskovitz (The Methuselarity Transformation, 2014, etc.), the first in a trilogy.
In 2041, Marcus Takana is approached by a woman named Terra, who makes an offer. A wealthy benefactor will provide for him for the rest of his life, giving him the money and access he needs to achieve his potential. However, when that benefactor’s body reaches the end of its mortal life, he and Marcus will switch bodies—resulting in Marcus’ immediate death. The process is known as Ambrosia Conversion. “So you're the devil and you've come to buy my soul?” he asks Terra. She responds: “Not your soul, Mr. Takana. You can keep that. It’s no use to us at all. It’s your body we want. And we’re prepared to pay you handsomely for it.” Marcus, who has nothing else in his life save his immaculate physique, agrees. The future inhabitant of Marcus’ body is Raymond “Ray” Mettler, who rose to celebrity with an invention that seemed as though it would save the environment—and who became a pariah when it began to destroy it instead. Marcus’ new life soon becomes an amazing success story involving love, children, and influence, so much so that he wonders: Should he really be expected to give all this up? In Marcus and Ray, Moskovitz has constructed an ingenious scenario probing the ethics of technology, class, and identity. His prose blends the technical and the emotional to create moments of unexpected beauty: “Terra airlifted him by drone to the edge of the city by the waterfront. It was still dark when she disappeared back into the sky. Marcus could hear water lapping against the seawall and a cacophony of barking sounds. ‘Seals.’ ” The author’s commitment to deeply developing his characters—as well hitting them with more than a few twists and turns—elevates what could have been merely an interesting thought experiment into a compelling novel with some emotional heft. The reader looks forward to additional fables of the high-tech future in the following volumes.
An imaginative and soundly executed SF morality tale.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73417-890-6
Page Count: 333
Publisher: Fluke Tale Productions
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2019
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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