A blend of mystery, lacerating comedy, and psychology that never quite jells.
Irish-born Hughes (The Detainees, not reviewed), a well-known comic in Great Britain, tells of an unpleasant young man who uncovers his family's darkest secrets after his father's suicide.
With a name strikingly similar to the author's, Shea Hickson delivers a first-person narrative that veers from viciousness to sentimentality. A loner and a self-proclaimed cynic, Shea lives a singularly unproductive existence—unless you consider occasional forays into petty terrorism productive. Since his younger brother Orwell, a successful journalist, has stolen his one true love, he makes do with occasional sex on one-night stands, most recently with a hairdresser whom Shea has the misfortune to get pregnant. When he starts to read his late father's diary, he is shaken to realize that his parents' lives were not all they seemed. At the same time, the mysterious would-be terrorist "Robin Hood" entangles him more and more deeply in his schemes. In following Shea, the story attempts to blend elements of hip black comedy, crime mystery, and psychological study, but Hughes never quite finds the right balance. He's worked out the details of the mystery plot meticulously, every apparent red herring eventually explained, but there is little sense of suspense. The jokes, which tend toward the obscene and trendy, including an unfortunate reference to Robert Downey Jr., don't travel well across the Atlantic, and readers may tire of Shea's never-ending paeans to the joy of fellatio. As a character who's being studied, Shea grows, if not likable, at least less despicable, but other family members remain cardboard cutouts. And Shea learns the details of his parents' history, though not much about their hearts and souls, while ultimately, as so often happens with fiction based on the "the big secret," the revelation itself is a let-down, too weak to carry the weight of the reputation preceding it.
A blend of mystery, lacerating comedy, and psychology that never quite jells.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7432-0159-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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
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
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