There are some good lines scattered among these poems, but the laughs are tame. If the best satires are backed with the fury...
Here, Gywnn has culls the mostly feckless results of 30 years of work in the satirical vein. He is an accomplished, if not very daring rhymster, and shows an ability to work in several classical forms, including the villanelle and sonnet. The meter is usually of the sing-song variety, and this monotony prevents sustained attention to the poems. The objects of Gwynn’s derision are generally what one would expect from a university professor: shopping malls and brand-name consumerism, celebrities (“Display thy breasts, my Demi, like a bough / hung with such fruits as only Gods endow”), and that much-maligned species, the graduate student. It is a critical commonplace that strong satire outlasts its objects: the names change but the joke stays fresh. The correlate of this dictum is that one must not blame failed satire on its choice of victims: while Gwynn’s targets are admittedly easy, the real problem is his unbarbed wit. This is most clearly seen in his long narrative poem The Narcissiad. The gesture is to Pope, and the rhyme scheme is the Augustan poet’s characteristic couplet. More locally, the title refers to Christopher Lasch’s study of narcissism, which may have been spicy in the ’80s though it has not aged well. Gwynn’s tale traces the career of a “mock-confessional” poet, one who has never read the classics and draws inspiration instead from the shaving mirror and tabloids. He routs all good poets with the help of cynical publicists and joins the Olympians on their mount; it is Zeus who finally renders the poet to his proper station: “Your sorry offering is refused. / To be quite blunt, sir, we are not amused.” The poet satirized here is, of course, unrecognizable and the portrait is therefore guaranteed not to offend. More importantly, the language of attack is flaccid, the humor of the archaisms is forced, and the formal qualities of the verse are unremarkable—Gywnn may as well have directed the Thunderer’s judgment at himself.
There are some good lines scattered among these poems, but the laughs are tame. If the best satires are backed with the fury of partisanship, Gywnn too often shirks the difficulty of taking sides.Pub Date: July 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-885266-91-X
Page Count: 180
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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