A short but substantial work about aspiration and failure.
In Rogoff’s debut novel, two old rivals reunite in a snowed-in bar in New England.
Forty-year-old Sy Kirschbaum has spent the last 17 years of his life doing two things: translating the magnum opus of an alcoholic Czech dissident writer, Jan Horak, and pining after his old flame, Ida Fields. Now Sy has returned from Prague to his hometown of Portland, Maine, at Ida’s behest. But before he can see her, he must meet with her husband—his estranged friend, Gabe Slatky, a playwright. The two meet in a nautical-themed hotel bar—The Captain’s Cabin—just as a blizzard blows into the region. It’s difficult for them to speak to each other, because Ida’s three-month affair with Sy 17 years ago stands between them, as does the fact that she returned to Gabe (and that she chose him in the first place). They’re ostensibly there to discuss Ida, who’s fallen into a crippling depression that’s causing her to neglect Gabe and their daughter Hannah, as well as the theater that she and her husband founded together in the city. However, as the men order round after round of drinks (with each occasionally threatening to leave), they discuss their friendship, Jan Horak’s novel, Gabe’s one truly great play, and the glimpsed lives of other bar patrons. “It’s a strange thing,” observes Gabe at one point, “this habit of sitting here surrounded by a bunch of strangers, being both observer and observed, observed, that is, doing basically nothing. And this is the great social gathering point, the barroom.” The bar becomes the setting for a continuing dialogue about love, memory, unrealized dreams, and the attempt to find redemption in a single, great work of art. Rogoff writes in a dense prose that displays the erudition and self-awareness of its narrator, Sy, critiquing every object and person in detail, veering into digressive anecdotes, and capturing dry but thoughtful exchanges (Sy: “The past is suffocating.” Gabe: “Can’t be any different in Prague or anywhere else for that matter.” Sy: “But it’s not my past, it’s not so personal”). Although some initial, deliberate murkiness about Ida’s condition may frustrate readers, they will soon realize that she’s mostly beside the point, from a narrative perspective. In the claustrophobic universe of The Captain’s Cabin, Sy and Gabe are themselves on a stage, and whatever conflicts exist between them must be resolved before they walk off into the darkness. Despite the title, Rogoff’s work doesn’t evoke Edgar Allan Poe; rather, Sy and Gabe’s back and forth calls to mind Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett—particularly their vision of the world as rigged, absurd, and ultimately hopeless. Information comes slowly and circuitously, and its importance isn’t always immediately apparent. But as the evening wears on, the lives of real people and fictional characters begin to overlap and blur. This premise might not strike everyone as compelling, but it results in an intriguing locked-room mystery—one in which the mystery is art itself.
A short but substantial work about aspiration and failure.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-944697-44-0
Page Count: 210
Publisher: Sagging Meniscus Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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