A funny, haunting collection that refuses to ward off the “shadow hunting us down.”
Shoemaker’s debut short story collection ranges in style and acquaints characters with prospects that leave them feeling disenchanted, disturbed, and sometimes changed for the better.
Some stories are purely comedic: A suburban stay-at-home dad keeps an earnest diary of his comings and goings and efforts at attracting his wife; an adult Karate Kid fan writes a come-to-Jesus letter to the Karate Kid himself; a self-aggrandizing fiction writer pens a letter that rejects an editor’s rejection; a trip to a giant Swedish furniture store (Ikea, thinly veiled) takes a turn for the darkly—and hilariously—sci-fi. Other stories are somber: The owner of an architecture firm hires illegal immigrants to save money on office cleaning bills and gets caught; Mormon men struggle to reconcile their attachment to religious values with the harm it inflicts upon self and others; adults reconcile who they’d hoped to be with who they are; a group of cynical, burned-out teachers reckon with the murder of a student. With smart, cleareyed prose, Shoemaker depicts the excessiveness of white, upper-middle-class adulthood. His protagonists have bedroom balconies, BMWs, and strollers that “looked like NASA engineers” designed them, details which are juxtaposed against arresting descriptions of rural poverty. In spite of their shortcomings, these protagonists—white male guidance counselors, lawyers, teachers, Mormons—aren’t dismissible as caricatures. Most are intelligent, conflicted men tortured by their decisions to hurt others in the name of protecting their loved ones or their own lives. Unfortunately, female characters are less nuanced. They are props—interns, mothers, wives, romantic interests—that exist to reveal men to themselves. Still, Shoemaker makes sure that no matter how hard they try, the men here can’t ignore that they, the supposed altruistic ones, often do more harm than good.
A funny, haunting collection that refuses to ward off the “shadow hunting us down.”Pub Date: April 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9835860-2-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: No Record Press
Review Posted Online: July 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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