HERE ARE THE YOUNG MEN

Name: HERE ARE THE YOUNG MEN
Author: Rob Doyle
ISBN: 978-1-63286-190-0

by Rob Doyle ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2015

Rough in its language, physical violence, and reminders of youth’s potential for anything, the book joins a respectable...

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In 2003, amid boom times in Ireland, three teenagers spend the summer high on everything but life in this intense, at times nightmarish, debut.

Kearney daydreams of sick bloody mayhem, while bookish Rez sees through every facade to the pointlessness behind. Matthew is desperate for a girlfriend and destined to flop. They’re friends who have spent their last school year before college or work making trouble and getting themselves barred from their graduation ceremony. Jobless yet clearly riding the Celtic Tiger, they always have money to finance the “inevitable” idea of getting wasted. Day and night they drink and smoke pot or hash in truly striking quantities, with occasional detours for cocaine or Ecstasy. Vomit and most other bodily emissions are never far away, either from the main characters or any one of the junkies, drunkards, and street people strewn about Dublin’s fair city. While there are many darkly comic moments—a junkie’s volume of poetry is called “Molesting Your Inner Child”—the book isn’t for the squeamish, especially with regard to Kearney’s more extreme fantasies and three sickening deaths. The young men’s mischief takes an inevitable uglier turn when Kearney’s beating of a junkie leads to worse. Doyle’s take on the angst and awkward bonding of young males is strong enough that it highlights how little he has on the female side, essentially one solid but unexplored character. Still, he skillfully stokes suspense amid considerable repetition and makes these nasty slackers occasionally even elicit sympathy. He also makes sure they’re not stupid, which highlights the fact that their choices are. For many parents this could be an eye-opening, admonitory read—if they aren’t as unbelievably blind as the parents in the book.

Rough in its language, physical violence, and reminders of youth’s potential for anything, the book joins a respectable literary line dating back to A Clockwork Orange, if not Tom Jones and Vanity Fair.

Pub Date: June 16, 2015

ISBN: 978-1-63286-190-0

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Review Posted Online: April 14, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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EAST OF EDEN

by John Steinbeck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 19, 1952

But John Steinbeck, the philosopher, dominates his material and brings it into sharply moral focus.

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Tremendous in scope—tremendous in depth of penetration—and as different a Steinbeck as the Steinbeck of Burning Bright was from the Steinbeck of The Grapes of Wrath.

Here is no saga of the underprivileged—no drama of social significance. Tenderness, which some felt was inherent in everything Steinbeck wrote, is muted almost to the vanishing point in this story of conflict within character, impact of character on character, of circumstances on personalities, of the difficult acceptance of individual choice as against the dominance of inherited traits. The philosophy is intimately interwoven with the pace of story, as he follows-from New England to California over some fifty odd years-the two families which hold stage center. There are the Trasks, brothers in two generations, strangely linked, strangely at war the one with the other; there are the Hamiltons (John Steinbeck's own forebears), a unique Irish born couple, the man an odd lovable sort of genius who never capitalizes on his ideas for himself, the tiny wife, tart, cold-and revealing now and again unexpected gentleness of spirit, the burgeoning family, as varied a tribe as could be found. And- on the periphery but integral to the deepening philosophy which motivates the story, there is the wise Chinese servant scholar and gentleman, who submerges his own goals to identify himself wholly with the needs of the desolate Adam Trask, crushed by his soulless wife's desertion, and the twin boys, Cal, violent, moody, basically strong enough to be himself—and Aron, gentle, unwilling to face disagreeable facts, beloved by all who met him. In counterpoint, the story follows too the murky career of Adam's wife, Cathy—who came to him from a mysteriously clouded past, and returned to a role for which she was suited—as a costly whore, and later as Madame in Salinas most corrupt "house," where the perversions of sex ridden males were catered to—and cruelty capitalized upon.Shock techniques applied with rapier and not bludgeon will rule the book out for the tender-skinned.

But John Steinbeck, the philosopher, dominates his material and brings it into sharply moral focus.

Pub Date: Sept. 19, 1952

ISBN: 0142004235

Page Count: 616

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1952

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

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An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.