A mixed bag, but this allegorical tale is definitely worth a read.
In this debut novel, Pepe offers an intriguing mixture of cage fighting and religion in an homage to Homer’s Iliad.
The story features a young protagonist whose real name is Achilles Jeannopoulos, but who goes by the nickname “Archie.” He’s a veteran of conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and a cage fighter who’s proud of his Greek-American heritage. In this tale that echoes the Iliad, he is, of course, a stand-in for his namesake warrior; his trainer and best friend, Byron, is Patroclus; his corner-man, Mackey, is Odysseus; the venal club owner, Joe, represents King Agamemnon; and Archie’s girlfriend, Meaghan, is Briseis. His archenemy in the cage is a man named Heckman (standing in for Hector). Archie is a good fighter and an endearing wise guy; he’s also religious, and the Upper Room Praise and Worship Church sponsors him as a fighter. Clearly, he’s a complex young man who’s afire with passion. Joe wants to set Archie up against Heckman to bring in the crowds, but Heckman is a professional fighter, powered by steroids, who’s merely slumming at the club, so Archie resists the club owner’s urgings. Then Archie discovers that he is suffering from an inoperable brain tumor. However, the church needs money desperately, so Byron, long retired, fights Heckman, hoping to win a fat purse. Later, Archie, who’s in the most fragile of health, takes on Heckman himself. Afterward, his tumor is bleeding and he’ll almost certainly die soon, so he sets off in his sailboat for his ancestral homeland, Greece, powered by rage and alcohol. Along the way, he has further adventures, including an apparent debate and standoff with Lucifer himself. This is a highly ambitious novel—and, for many readers, it may seem to be too ambitious. Indeed, it quickly becomes an overcrowded catchall for the author’s thoughts on a very wide range of subjects, including God and morality, mortality, heroism, and present-day culture, among many other topics. To that end, there are many mini-essays herein; overall, it feels like a young man’s novel—passionate but undisciplined—and as a result, it often seems overwritten. For example, when a sad Archie impulsively plucks a flower, he immediately regrets what he’s done to it, and in the very next paragraph, the flower is referred to as “slain foliage.” Sometimes, the text contains inventive grammar, such as “the work perspired him.” On the other hand, it’s hard not to like a book that works so hard to make its points, and Archie comes off as a genuinely likable smart aleck and hero-in-training. The exchanges between him and Meaghan are affecting, with her loving and insightful but frustrated, and him, often, as dense as a post. That said, some readers may want to throw up their hands when the drunk and dying Archie imprudently sets sail for Greece. In the end, though, it somehow all works—in part, because he doesn’t wind up in Greece, after all.
A mixed bag, but this allegorical tale is definitely worth a read.Pub Date: April 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-692-65687-7
Page Count: 242
Publisher: Chopper Press
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2018
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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