Faust's novels were well-received in the 1970s, but he couldn't find a publisher in the '80s. Now he delivers his third novel in two years (When She Was Bad, 1994, etc.)—a murder story on which he hangs a broad satire of the contemporary US. Ted Moon is a pitcher for a New York team more or less like the hapless Mets of several years ago. He's talented but has a history of violent behavior, alcoholic blackouts, and long, insane recovery periods at a remote hospital in New Mexico. Unlike Faust's In the Forest of the Night (1993), a meticulously plotted tale set in Central America, Faust's latest has almost no story. Moon is accused of murdering four transsexuals, and to escape arrest he takes off cross-country on a manic binge, finally establishing his innocence—of murder, at least—and rejoining his team in Los Angeles. The reader never really thinks Moon committed the murders. Faust's baseball episodes, the few that there are, are nicely rendered, no doubt because Faust was a professional ballplayer himself. But his interest is in Moon's wild, often hilarious send- ups of sexuality (a sports psychologist who counsels baseball players to plumb their feminine sides and not to be afraid of touching one another), feminism, tabloid journalism (which feeds the public appetite for salaciousness by treating intimate sexual subjects in a ``scientific'' manner), and every species of political correctness—which he gives us while watching TV, ``the black hole,'' in motel after motel. The novel is sharp, sometimes reactionary satire rather like Kingsley Amis at his most vicious, delivered in a circular, mocking, high-flying harangue. Incensed by one of his ex-wives' sensible refusal to let him visit his children, he says, ``It was not the lack of justice that I minded; it was the lack of shame for the lack of justice.'' Faust could be criticized for his indifferent plotting, but Ted Moon's outrageous manic tirade is strong medicine: hits hard, but has a tonic effect.
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-85398-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995
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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