Some of Townsend’s veddy British jokes don’t cross the Atlantic, but those that do are funny, frivolous, and devastatingly...
More satirical diaries of a persistently pathetic English everyman pitches brickbats and sourballs at Tony Blair, Princess Di worshippers, TV cooking shows, celibacy, and the ever increasing bunch of village idiots and ne’er-do-wells in Ashby-de-la-Zouch.
Back in 1982, long before Bridget Jones turned feckless romance and menstrual cramps into bestselling silliness, playwright and comic novelist Townsend introduced The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged, 13 3/4. Over the years, the precocious adolescent who wrote bad poetry and made hilariously misinformed comments about his dysfunctional family, has grown—though not necessarily up. This sixth installment covers Adrian’s misadventures, with sarcastic side glances at national events, from March 1997 to May 1998, and opens with 31-year-old Adrian, author of an unpublished novel, employed as a chef at the Hoi Polloi, a fashionable Soho restaurant that serves such ineptly prepared “traditional” English fare as overcooked frozen liver and runny Yorkshire pudding (from the kitchen, Adrian glimpses Bridget Jones grimacing over dinner). His Nigerian wife Jo Jo has fled back to Africa while their three-year-old offspring, William, stays with Adrian’s father, George, who is chronically depressed because he can’t get it up anymore, and mother, Pauline, who is having an affair with Ivan Braithwaite, the father of Adrian’s first girlfriend, the voluptuous Dr. Pandora Braithwaite, who is also Adrian’s first and, so far, unrequited love. The diaries open with Adrian’s cautious surprise at Tony Blair’s election, for who should ride in on Blair’s coattails as the new MP for Ashby-de-la-Zouch? Adrian contemplates celibacy, makes a short-lived TV cooking show called Offally Good!, Princess Di is killed in a car crash, Adrian’s father has an affair with Ivan Braithwaite’s wife, the Hoi Polloi is closed when foot fungus is found in a sink and, incredibly, Pandora and Adrian wind up in bed.
Some of Townsend’s veddy British jokes don’t cross the Atlantic, but those that do are funny, frivolous, and devastatingly dead-on.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-56947-204-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
© 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.
