Townsend (Adrian Mole, 2000, etc.) has a rare gift for wickedly funny one-liners—and her lighthearted affection for human...
The Prime Minister is out of touch with modern life, and the hyenas of the British press are having a field day with his numerous gaffes.
Edward Clare doesn’t even know the price of a pint of milk, and that’s the least of it. Time he got out in the real world, eh? And so he does, disguised in his wife’s clothes, accompanied by the doughty policeman named Jack Sprat, who usually keeps watch at the door of Number 10 Downing Street and now must guard the bewigged, bespangled, and happily effeminate PM. His wife Adele, an eccentric genius on maintenance lithium, doesn’t even notice that he’s gone. She has Very Important Things to worry about: for one, whether or not to arrange for the burial of the amputated leg that her housekeeper’s son mangled in a motorcycle accident. And if this chunk of flesh is entitled to a funeral, what about warts? How many would it take to fill an average coffin? Alerted by delighted reporters, a Third World mathematician kindly provides the answer before Adele loses her mind entirely. Back to Edward: en route to Edinburgh on a very late and overcrowded train, he/she gets to mingle with real people at last—everyone from a bitchy female entrepreneur glued to a cell phone and trying to sell chicken eyeballs to the Middle East, to struggling inhabitants of council housing, out-of-luck but scrappy blokes with names like Coughing Tony and Polio John. Their zigzagging odyssey proceeds at breakneck pace and eventually brings all full circle back to London—but not before Jack has fallen in love with Edward’s sister Pamela and rescued his mother and her molting budgie from a crack dealer with apocalyptic dreams of glory.
Townsend (Adrian Mole, 2000, etc.) has a rare gift for wickedly funny one-liners—and her lighthearted affection for human foibles and foolishness keeps this spot-on satire from becoming too brittle.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-56947-349-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2003
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
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