A businessman almost destroys a liberal-arts college in this scattershot satire from essayist/commentator Rosenblatt (Lapham Rising, 2006, etc.).
Ancient, prestigious Beet College, north of Boston, was founded by a pig farmer. The hog motif is ubiquitous, so it’s fitting that the chairman of the board of trustees, Joel Bollovate, the mighty real-estate developer, is quite a pig himself. Bollovate is threatening to close the college; the $265 million endowment has been spent. He has issued an ultimatum. Unless the faculty can come up with a new curriculum that will bring in big bucks fast, it’s doomsday. Young Professor Peace Porterfield is chosen to chair the CCR (committee on curriculum reform). Idealistic and unworldly, Peace is a hero in the Frank Capra/Jimmy Stewart mold. He believes the heart of a university is teaching and learning, not committees, but he accepts the challenge, though his colleagues are a bunch of craven PC buffoons, and the CCR meetings go nowhere. Aside from the cartoonish villain Bollovate, Rosenblatt reserves his most withering scorn for the faculty, but he also jabs at a handful of disruptive students bent on nihilistic indolence. Their leader is a transfer student, a Southern belle desperate to conceal her past, who is being courted unsuccessfully by a faux Arab, Akim Ben Laden, actually a Jewish kid rebelling against his despotic father, a rabbi. The students’ antics, which include the occupation of two buildings, fill up the hole where a plot should have been, but the humor falls flat. In welcome contrast is a straightforward description of Peace teaching a poetry class; Rosenblatt celebrates beautifully the joy of the classroom before returning to more antics. Akim, in his off-campus cave, makes an amazing online discovery about Bollovate that ends the story.
With a lighter touch Rosenblatt might have produced a successful wry comedy.Pub Date: Jan. 29, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-134427-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2007
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Debut novel by hip-hop rap artist Sister Souljah, whose No Disrespect (1994), which mixes sexual history with political diatribe, is popular in schools country-wide. In its way, this is a tour de force of black English and underworld slang, as finely tuned to its heroine’s voice as Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. The subject matter, though, has a certain flashiness, like a black Godfather family saga, and the heroine’s eventual fall develops only glancingly from her character. Born to a 14-year-old mother during one of New York’s worst snowstorms, Winter Santiaga is the teenaged daughter of Ricky Santiaga, Brooklyn’s top drug dealer, who lives like an Arab prince and treats his wife and four daughters like a queen and her princesses. Winter lost her virginity at 12 and now focuses unwaveringly on varieties of adolescent self-indulgence: sex and sugar-daddies, clothes, and getting her own way. She uses school only as a stepping-stone for getting out of the house—after all, nobody’s paying her to go there. But if there’s no money in it, why go? Meanwhile, Daddy decides it’s time to move out of Brooklyn to truly fancy digs on Long Island, though this places him in the discomfiting position of not being absolutely hands-on with his dealers; and sure enough the rise of some young Turks leads to his arrest. Then he does something really stupid: he murders his wife’s two weak brothers in jail with him on Riker’s Island and gets two consecutive life sentences. Winter’s then on her own, especially with Bullet, who may have replaced her dad as top hood, though when she selfishly fails to help her pregnant buddy Simone, there’s worse—much worse—to come. Thinness aside: riveting stuff, with language so frank it curls your hair. (Author tour)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-671-02578-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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