A confident, strongly voiced portrait of despair and the flickering light at the end of the tunnel.
Despair and salvation mix to powerful effect in Jacoby’s debut novel that follows a young man’s confrontation with suicide.
In 1982, 19-year-old Richard Issych’s life alternates between fear and despair. As seen in flashbacks, his life is marked by distance and alienation: Unable to connect to his family and lacking focus in work and college, he steadily works up the nerve to kill himself, culminating in a massive overdose of Quaaludes that lands him in a mental hospital outside Cleveland. As he slowly recovers from his overdose and adjusts to a regimen of seemingly ineffectual therapy and powerful antidepressants, he discovers a brotherhood of sorts among his fellow patients. However, not all his fellow patients are welcoming; some are dangerous in ways Richard can’t understand, and as he recovers, he finds that threats can take unexpected forms. With strong, assured writing, Jacoby confidently duplicates the frazzled, nonlinear mindset of someone impaired by medication and a shifting grasp on “sanity,” making clear the shattered nature of Richard’s perspective, which becomes a functioning part of the narrative rather than a showy literary device. While the doctors’ and nurses’ behaviors are presented entirely from Richard’s point of view, Jacoby also manages to suggest their depth and purpose through Richard’s sharpening perception, allowing the reader’s perspective to change without drawing attention to mechanics. More impressively, Jacoby presents the female characters through Richard’s limited viewpoint while achieving characterizations beyond what the troubled man is capable of perceiving, at least at his psychological nadir.
A confident, strongly voiced portrait of despair and the flickering light at the end of the tunnel.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2012
ISBN: 9780983969709
Page Count: 342
Publisher: Cloud Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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