While the premise requires large blocks of exposition, this tale ultimately offers an exuberant take on the afterlife.
A novel details one woman’s interactions with the dearly departed.
When Claire Anderson returns home from a canceled vacation, she is in for quite a surprise. Napoleon Bonaparte is sitting in her living room watching CNN. Soon Claire finds that the legendary leader is not the only unexpected guest: her kitchen contains Janis Joplin and Count Dracula. While an ordinary person would find such a scene deeply troubling, Claire is anxious but not completely flustered. She is a former afterlife coach and has seen this type of thing before. The details of this occupation are complex (and require a lengthy explanation) but it has essentially been Claire’s job to help troubled souls sort out issues from their lives and guide them to suitable places after they die. The catch is that Claire is retired from her vocation and she certainly did not anticipate such peculiar visitors. Will she be able to help these three disparate and needy individuals? After all, she is still dealing with the recent death of her husband; she has two teenage sons to worry about; and her promiscuous friend Karen Palmer has just become pregnant. The idea that such coaches exist makes for a unique, playful plot focusing on the possibility of life after death. Wouldn’t it be comforting (or perhaps annoying) to know that you may be able to work through problems you dealt with in life even after you died? The setup for Claire’s mission is inherently wacky and what sort of silliness a modern Joplin (who appears as a middle-aged Indian woman to non-coaches) will flaunt remains in flux (although the reader can assume, not incorrectly, that the rock star will still like alcohol). Certain circumstances can reach a little too far to be comedic, such as elderly people demanding affordable condoms at the behest of Joplin and Napoleon. But Paul’s (Snoop, 2013) story is at its best when indulging in the zany. Once the reader is onboard with the rules of Claire’s former position, there is no telling when all the kookiness will end and the deceased will recede to the pages of history.
While the premise requires large blocks of exposition, this tale ultimately offers an exuberant take on the afterlife.Pub Date: May 29, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5471-6674-9
Page Count: 330
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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