A wry and melancholy comedy of modern manners (and the lack thereof) in which a gay man briefly becomes the center of things in the lives of his mostly straight friends. Set in a rundown Cambridge, Mass., apartment house, McCauley's third (The Easy Way Out, 1992, etc.) is a haunting ballad of missed connections. Narrator Clyde is in no shape to be the ``man'' among this group of mismatched and confused characters—he's gay, hates his job teaching at The Learning Place (an adult education/singles scene deliciously skewered), and lives in mourning for a lover who's become an upwardly mobile yuppie. But when old college friend Louise arrives, with teenaged son Ben in tow, Clyde not only takes in the newcomers' dog but has to serve as intermediary for his housemate Marcus, who's just been informed that he's Ben's father. While trying to encourage Marcus to break the news to Ben, Clyde must also advise his divorced and distressed sister, Agnes, on how to handle their whiny, nasty, supposedly infirm father and Agnes's teenaged punk daughter. Fortunately for the reader, Clyde's insights are memorable: ``One calamitously ill-advised affectation, like a ridiculous hairstyle, a propensity for cheap jewelry, or overdeveloped calves, can act as a magnet, drawing bad luck and misery.'' Ultimately, as in a Jane Austen novel, the question to be answered is whose character will survive the tests and temptations life sets before them: Handsome Marcus wilts under pressure; the least promising character, Agnes, finds an improbable lover. And Clyde? He emerges from his ten-year lassitude prepared at last to live. A lovely, funny book that represents an impressive strengthening of McCauley's themes and talent. Without losing his refreshingly frank voice or off-center characters, he's created a lament for the way a winner-take-all society can distort and impoverish the fates of real people trying to break the downward trajectory of their lives. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Feb. 15, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-81053-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
War is hell in this novel of inspired absurdity.
Hailed as heroes on a stateside tour before returning to Iraq, Bravo Squad discovers just what it has been fighting for.
Though the shellshocked humor will likely conjure comparisons with Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse Five, the debut novel by Fountain (following his story collection, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, 2006) focuses even more on the cross-promotional media monster that America has become than it does on the absurdities of war. The entire novel takes place over a single Thanksgiving Day, when the eight soldiers (with their memories of the two who didn’t make it) find themselves at the promotional center of an all-American extravaganza, a nationally televised Dallas Cowboys football game. Providing the novel with its moral compass is protagonist Billy Lynn, a 19-year-old virgin from small-town Texas who has been inflated into some kind of cross between John Wayne and Audie Murphy for his role in a rescue mission documented by an embedded Fox News camera. In two days, the Pentagon-sponsored “Victory Tour” will end and Bravo will return to the business as usual of war. In the meantime, they are dealing with a producer trying to negotiate a film deal (“Think Rocky meets Platoon,” though Hilary Swank is rumored to be attached), glad-handing with the corporate elite of Cowboy fandom (and ownership), and suffering collateral damage during a halftime spectacle with Beyoncé. Over the course of this long, alcohol-fueled day, Billy finds himself torn, as he falls in love (and lust) with a devout Christian cheerleader and listens to his sister try to persuade him that he has done his duty and should refuse to go back. As “Americans fight the war daily in their strenuous inner lives,” Billy and his foxhole brethren discover treachery and betrayal beyond anything they’ve experienced on the battlefield.
War is hell in this novel of inspired absurdity.Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-088559-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
A fine demonstration of the power and versatility of Glück’s verse, this volume will delight fans and intrigue newcomers.
Glück’s international reputation as an accomplished and critically acclaimed contemporary poet makes the arrival of her new volume an eagerly anticipated event. This slender collection meets these expectations with 44 poems that pull the reader into a realm of meditation and memory. She sets most of them in the heat of summer—a time of year when nature seems almost oppressively heavy with life—in order to meditate on the myriad realities posed by life and death. Glück mines common childhood images (a grandmother transforming summer fruit into a cool beverage, two sisters applying fingernail polish in a backyard) to resurrect the intense feelings that accompany awakening to the sensual promises of life, and she desperately explores these resonant images, searching for a path that might reconcile her to the inevitability of death. These musings produce the kinds of spiritual insights that draw so many readers to her work: she suggests that we perceive our experiences most intensely when tempered by memory, and that such experiences somehow provide meaning for our lives. Yet for all her metaphysical sensitivity and poetic craftsmanship, Glück reaffirms our ultimate fate: we all eventually die. Rather than resort to pithy mysticism or self-obsessive angst, she boldly insists that death creeps in the shadows of even our brightest summers. The genius of her poems lies in their ability to sear the summertime onto our souls in such a way that its “light will give us no peace.”
A fine demonstration of the power and versatility of Glück’s verse, this volume will delight fans and intrigue newcomers.Pub Date: April 9, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-018526-0
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
