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GOING POSTAL

The title is the only funny thing about this fictional memoir of a mailman's son, a 27-year-old slacker who's haunted by ``the Evil Seed of Postal Hate.'' His juvenile rants and violent fantasies add to the sense that he's really just slumming in Bukowski-land. For all his tough-guy posturing and anti-p.c. invective, Steve Reeves is really a whiny navel-gazer who believes he's entitled to a good life. After all, he's the first in his family to graduate from college (UC/San Diego), even though he also describes himself as a ``malcontent'' and ``misfit.'' Full of adolescent hatred for his family, Steve lives in Berkeley, where he finds himself, in short order, fired (from a bagel shop) and dumped by his girlfriend (for a hippie). He wastes away his days fantasizing about supermodels and recounting the stories of famous psycho-mailmen. He shares these unamusing tales of mass murder with his fellow misfits: Billy, a paranoid biker in his 50s; Brady, a homosexual- hating Texan; and Callahan, an affected rich kid—none of them providing the comic relief they're seemingly intended to. On a trip home for his sister's wedding (to a mailman), Steve's nasty father gives him a Colt .45, and Steve, a crack shot, focuses all his future obsessions on his weapon, compiling an ``Enemies of the Realm List'' of all those who've done him wrong. Episodic to a fault, the narrative bobs along on a series of silly antics, from bowling on PCP to barbecuing steak at a vegan picnic. None of Steve's fears concerning his father's allegedly violent legacy mask the real Oedipal drama at the heart of this frivolous story. The upbeat ending is as unearned as all the angst—a new girlfriend and some ready cash save the world from Steve's childish rage. Jokes about Charles Manson and designer coffee—this pointless debut appeals to the lowest common denominator of slacker chic, itself a rather passÇ phenomenon.

Pub Date: May 27, 1997

ISBN: 0-425-15768-7

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Berkley

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1997

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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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