A conceptually intriguing portrait of the man Elvis might have been if he weren’t all shook up.
Elvis forms a wary friendship with the pauper, who may just be his long-lost brother.
Long-time character actor Carlson captures a different brand of drama in a debut novel that imagines the alternate history of the King’s twin. Redneck laborer Ray Johnston has a good heart, but the man can’t catch a break to save his life. At the age of 42, his only treasures are a broken-down pickup truck, a trailer in need of a paint job and one and a half hard-earned acres of dirt. He collects his thoughts by pounding an old guitar and singing the blues, a coincidence that adds to his uncanny resemblance to another Memphis icon having his own troubles in 1977. A rediscovered diary leads Ray to the somewhat terrifying idea that he may be Elvis’s big brother Jesse Garon, mistakenly reported stillborn. The author’s convincing rendering of the working man is touching, illustrating Ray’s humiliating experiences as he struggles to keep jobs, maintain his relationship with a local barmaid and pay the nursing home in which his ailing father lives. In fact, contrasting Ray with his paranoid, drug-addled sibling could have been a garish exercise. Thankfully, when “E” finally appears, Carlson presents him gracefully as a man much like his brother, one whose life has gotten completely out of hand in different ways. The two brothers form a tenuous bond, though their reunion is plagued by troubles ranging from tabloid temptations and Vernon Presley’s misgivings to a botched kidnapping that leaves Ray in worse straits. “What great twins they were; one became the most famous person in the world and the other got his friends ripped off for every penny they had and couldn’t quite keep up his house trailer payments,” Ray muses. Things end badly, as they did for Elvis, but the King’s parting gift to Ray will bring a smile even to the most tangential Elvis fans.
A conceptually intriguing portrait of the man Elvis might have been if he weren’t all shook up.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-312-37398-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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