A strange, pointless, highly offensive debut novel about a homosexual porn star who fantasizes about seducing the boys who study at the yeshiva across the street from him. Narrator Rick lives alone in a somewhat tumbledown section of Los Angeles. Once a successful actor in the Valley Boy demimonde of gay pornography, he is now reduced to occasional work as an extra in Hollywood. He spends most of his days reading Isherwood, Emerson, or Joyce and has vague ideas about trying his own hand at writing —a blasphemous, homoerotic gospel in the style of the 1611 King James Version of the Bible,— yet there’s a big distraction nearby: a boys— school for Hasidic Jews. Rick is fascinated not only by their youth, obviously, but also by his awareness that they consider him—as both a gentile and a homosexual—a lost soul. He becomes friendly with a few of them, gives them pornography, offers them blow jobs, and even begins to wear Hasidic garb. This quite understandably angers them; they insult him to his face and shoot him in the neck with a BB gun when his back is turned. Rick is a case study in personality disorder: An atheist, he detests Judaism as a murderous superstition, although he finds himself more and more strongly drawn to it as a means of possessing the schoolboys he is more and more obsessed with every day: —I wanted to hold Avi in my arms, and I wanted him to tell me he loved me, and I wanted him to come in my mouth, and I wanted him to see his God—in me.— Eventually his desire is consummated not in reality but in the manuscript of a novel he writes about —the boys across the street.— There is an ugly subgenre of gay fiction that appeals mainly to pedophiles, and Sandford’s work—prurient, vulgar, misogynistic, blasphemous, tasteless, pompous, and subliterate—falls deep within its bowels.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-571-19960-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1999
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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