Back in Baltimore to pick up an honorary Ph.D. from his alma mater, Calvert College, novelist Tom Fallon recalls the wild year of 1965, when he wriggled out from under the patronage of elitist Professor Sylvester Spaulding and came under the spell of Jeremy Raines—con artist, lunatic, and entrepreneur—and the inmates of his communal house.... Jeremy is the inventor of the Identi-Card, a photo ID he markets to area colleges, with consistently maladroit results: the photos are misframed, or matched with the wrong names, or melted in the laminating machine. But charismatic Jeremy, ever in search of new funding, inveigles his loyal housemates—a Baltimore Brando, Eddie Eckel; health-food nut Babe McCallister; Sister Lulu Hardwell; and self-styled Beat poet Val Jackson—into shouldering his burdens and bailing him out of comic confrontations with Johns Hopkins president A. Taft Manley, Kodak front-man Alan Saxon-Hogg, and gangster Rudy Antonelli (not to mention such minor interlopers as crowbar-wielding Dan the Trucker, demanding that Sister Lulu, thrown out of the convent following an unlikely fling, return to his bed and board). As long as Ward (Red Baker, 1985, etc.) sticks to retailing Jeremy's shenanigans, Tom's affectionate reminiscences are often hilarious, but when he turns to the life lessons imparted by Tom's squabbling parents or his sophomoric rebellion against Dr. Spaulding or the kind of ``pure schematic bullshit'' that comes out in intense, run-on epiphanies or apothegms (``After only one maniacal afternoon with this madman, my entire emotional center had been displaced'')—then Ward, a generally successfully light humorist, gets stranded past his depth. And he gives short weight on his secondary characters—particularly his women, who do little more than change into a series of increasingly tight outfits for sex or photo ops. Affable and amusing, if, unlike the author, you don't take it too seriously.
Pub Date: April 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-671-79568-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1993
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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