A literary-minded schizophrenic with a story to tell dominates Frawley’s complex, multilayered debut novel.
The set-up for this elliptical, often uneven fiction begins in the introduction where Thomas Kinsella, a doctor at the Riverview Psychiatric Hospital, doggedly weaves together the threads of his mentally unstable yet cognitively aware patient, Dermot Fallon. Armed with information from Grace, Fallon’s compassionate companion who witnessed the progressive deterioration of his psyche and urged him to see a therapist in 2005, Kinsella presents Fallon’s serpentine story in his patient’s own words and from his own manic, bewildered mind—something he calls “the very model of a purposive psychosis.” Fallon’s story is imaginatively narrated with a dreamscape sensibility as he lushly describes his histrionics as an English-born child of Irish-Catholic heritage. The early death of his emotionally abusive father and interactions with Grace, Dermot’s cousin, Sean, and Sean’s wife, Fiona, give cause for Dr. Kinsella to offer clarifying, introspective footnotes on nearly every page. But as Fallon writes of his attempts to decipher his father’s encrypted, handwritten journals, he also reveals a careful seduction of Fiona and a betrayal of his cousin, all culminating in a downward spiral into schizophrenia. Less a novel than a steady stream of hallucinatory imageries, this tale within a tale incorporates aspects from memoir, fiction and speculative fiction genres, and while gutsy for a debut, Frawley’s tale strains too often to retain order and narrative cohesiveness. Amid a flurry of distractive font styles, superimposed text, shifting points of view, cryptograms and blacked-out pages, the plot suffocates. Frawley, an English writer living in Canada, demonstrates impressive potential in painting the grim realities of a functioning schizophrenic, but this expository first work needs to be better focused to capture a reading audience’s full attention. A mixed bag—disappointingly complicated yet creatively inspired.
Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2011
ISBN: 978-0986901300
Page Count: 297
Publisher: 529
Review Posted Online: Nov. 16, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
Did you like this book?
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
Did you like this book?
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
GET IT
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
Did you like this book?
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2021 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
