An achingly drawn despair, the kind that leads to high body counts and unhappy endings.
A tale of surpassing anomie set in a grim, late-night electronic-game arcade.
Kurt Black is 20 years old and at loose ends, pulling the night shift at a foul, coin-operated gaming parlor aptly named Warzone Amusements in Perth, Australia. It is the kind of sticky-linoleum, mangy-carpet place that should only exist in bad dreams. Early on, Black appears to be a wounded soul with a bit of poet lurking under his hard-bitten exterior: “Solvent-intoxicated memories crept from every corner and the B.O. of fear could be traced leaching from the walls and ceiling.” The clientele is mostly down-and-out Aborigines, glue sniffers and gang bangers who detest the white Black, a feeling that is reciprocated. Newcomer Dowing has Black rub very close to bigotry, but never tip into it. Rather, he sours to the human race and “the sewer they called modern life; a shit-city extravaganza of violence and perversions and hopelessness and depravity and cold cola and greasy chips between the struggle, the thieving and the cheating for money.” Black has never been shy when it comes to confrontations, but Dowing works him slowly but steadily into a lather of hormone-fueled rage, progressing from bare fists to spiked brass-knuckles to a sawed-off shotgun. The author introduces characters who may pull Black back from total spiritual annihilation, but they are fleeting–the ghost of a dead man, some ill-starred girlfriends, a Bible-thumper–and give Black only pause to reflect on his downward spiral, a junkyard dog in a place that’s little more than a feral zoo. The writing is of such a visceral quality that it is tempting to think Dowing has been down this road, a road littered with car wrecks it is impossible to peel one’s eyes from. Hopefully not. If Black is shatterproof, he’s also mean, too mean to ever meet his definition of a hero–the common man who soldiers on despite the odds. For Black, the world’s dark and fit for mayhem.
An achingly drawn despair, the kind that leads to high body counts and unhappy endings.Pub Date: Dec. 29, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-84799-383-0
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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