The coming-of-age tale of a boy who becomes a man through the savage rites of high-school football. Honor, loyalty, even life and death form the core of this wrenching story, while sport is the mere shell.
A newcomer to town, Billy Dyer tries out for the Spartans in the Gulf Coast city of Oleander, Fla., in 1964. He is relentless in his hitting and blocking, all the brutal fundamentals of the game. Only Sim Sizemore stands between him and a varsity slot, but Billy rebels during the team’s bizarre Mystery Night ritual, and Sim suffers a horrible injury. With Billy taking Sim’s place, the Spartans win game after game and appear headed for the state championship. Winning matters above all else to many of Oleander’s citizens, and Billy’s fierce drive and talent hold the key. But will he spill the secrets of Mystery Night and destroy Oleander football? Important men accuse Billy of off-field actions that dishonor the team and push him into a Faustian bargain that allows him to continue playing. Billy lives with his divorced and hapless father, whose desperate troubles intertwine with Billy’s. Many people fear Billy for what he knows and might do; many more admire him as long as he wins on the gridiron—but God help him otherwise. But the plot goes beyond football. Do rich men own Billy the way they own his father? Do they own the city itself? The climactic scene appears slightly contrived, written with a movie in mind, yet it brings the novel to a satisfying conclusion. Watson has given poor Billy Dyer more trouble than any teenager should have to bear. Readers will certainly root for him, but they had better not count on a warm-and-fuzzy ending.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-936070-98-5
Page Count: 330
Publisher: Akashic
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
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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