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BATTLE CREEK

A tepid first novel for boys who love the boys of summer. Lasser’s narrative trots perfunctorily through the lives of a handful of minor-league baseball aspirants before culminating in a championship game played in the cereal mecca of the title. Gil is the coach. Divorced, troubled by the failure of his team, Koch and Sons, to win the national finals for four years running, Gil has uninteresting intimacy issues with his dying father that need to be worked out before the story can end. Vince is the pitching coach. Terminally ill with emphysema, he sports a wise and craggy countenance that has dispensed wisdom to his bullpen for years, yet his wife refuses to learn how to pay the telephone bill at home. Vince dies just before the finals, and the wife is relieved of her responsibilities’she dies, too. Mercer, an aging pitcher whose skills are slowly fading, also has intimacy issues, in his case with his girlfriend: he has to cough up a commitment before the first pitch can be thrown. Luke James is a troubled ex-con, a tightly wound young wizard with the bat just getting used to life on the outside: ticking time-bomb, or possible savior of the team? No one can say, since James is killed at bat by a wild pitch as the big game winds down. Readers will want to send these cardboard characters to the showers for the season. The on-the-field action, which in sports novels is often the redeeming point of light in an otherwise uninspired blur of domestic adjectives, fails to stir and is only dutifully described, as if the author actually wants to return as quickly as possible to the really interesting emotional lives of these guys. Featuring a desultory text strewn with faceless women in perky T-shirts who mostly serve drinks, Lasser’s debut has as much spellbinding crackle as a pre-season rainout. (Book-of-the-Month Club selection; author tour)

Pub Date: May 1, 1999

ISBN: 0-688-16785-3

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1999

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A LITTLE LIFE

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. 21, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

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

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