A sometimes-stereotypical tale of university life, but readers steeped in academia will appreciate and identify with...
A professor faces the drama of academia and the emotional demands of family life in Senturia’s debut novel about work and ambition.
Martin Quint and his wife, Jenny, are trying to conceive a child. If that weren’t stressful enough, he’s about to start another semester at the Cambridge Technology Institute—teaching the “Circuits & Electronics” class, advising grad students, and hurtling toward a deadline to submit a proposal to DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). On the same day that he tries to manage an upset colleague whose paper has been rejected, he’s invited to participate in the university’s highly confidential Personnel Committee. His first assignment is to advise the tenure application of his fellow professor Kat Rodriguez. His attention to Kat makes Jenny jealous as she juggles an interior design job, the care of her 4-year-old son from her first marriage, Martin’s absences due an intense workload, and finally, a pregnancy. Meanwhile, Kat prepares her stellar tenure record, despite grumblings from the tenure review panel that research grants more tenure than teaching experience. Just when Jenny needs Martin most, he accompanies Kat to a conference in Istanbul, fanning the flames of his wife’s resentment. The couple comes together in time to welcome a baby daughter into the world, but that joy is quickly dampened when someone steals Martin’s backpack, which contains confidential documents about Kat’s application. The novel comes to a crescendo as Kat hears the final tenure decision, Martin receives an unexpected job offer, and Jenny and Martin try to meet their family goals. The chapters move along quickly and the dialogue is true to life, particularly between Jenny and Martin as they navigate the bumpy road of marriage. The initially overwhelming amount of academic jargon (which doesn’t even define what DARPA stands for) eventually becomes less important as Senturia establishes the characters’ wants and needs. It’s a shame, though, that there are stereotypes among the players: for example, Felice, Martin’s West African assistant, is described as “coal black,” and women characters often cry, whether they’re a professor, student, wife, or sister. More nuance in these and other characterizations would have elevated this novel.
A sometimes-stereotypical tale of university life, but readers steeped in academia will appreciate and identify with Martin’s problems.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4602-7468-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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