of America's failure to slow down and smell the roses, whatever color they may be.
A hideous home-brewed housepaint has unpredictable consequences for the daft residents of a small Ohio town that’s preparing for its annual tourist event, in this second midwestern gothic from Levandoski (Going to Chicago, 1997).
Lawyer D. William Aitchbone, aspiring Republican power-broker of tiny Tuttwyler, Ohio, will let nothing stop him from making this summer's Squaw Days festival the best ever. As the festival's new chairman, Aitchbone (who sees the festival as a launching pad for his political career) is yanking every string he can grab to have the US vice president ride in the annual parade and possibly even judge the pie-eating and tobacco-spitting contests. But should a vice president have to see the drab, unpainted two-story clapboard house of Howard Dornick, the illegitimate son of the town's only war hero? Aitchbone decides to threaten Dornick, the city's maintenance man, with job privatization; as a result, Dornick buys the cheapest paint he can find, mixes in assorted household cleaning fluids, lubricating oils and antifreeze, and slathers on an eye-searing shade of green that contrasts violently with the prim, pearly white Victorians facing the town square. Levandoski's deliberately trite metaphor for the shock of the new has residual effects: spinster librarian Katherine Hardihood falls in love with Dornick and, during a visit to the festival (a tacky sham that celebrates the murder of an Indian princess and her child by Tuttwyler’s founding fathers, and the princess's ghostly forgiveness of the crime), clinically depressed New York commercial color-consultant Hugh Harbinger sees gold in what he trademarks as Serendipity Green. From here on, Levandoski takes his farce down paths less familiar—and less assured. We learn that the town's conflicted personalities are linked to a motormouth Iranian psychiatrist, Pirooz Aram; that a melodramatic secret lurks in a forgotten grave; and that an assassin lurks among the parade’s cheering sightseers. A funny, if formulaic, send-up of heartland hypocrisy slowly ripens into a more interesting but less coherent observation
of America's failure to slow down and smell the roses, whatever color they may be.Pub Date: April 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-57962-063-9
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
