An inventive, if unsteady, tale of misplaced affection.
A debut horror novel explores one man’s spooky relationship with an actress from a bygone era.
Nathan begins this story on a moonlit night in New York City. Jade Weary is a present-day, New York City-based editor with an obsession. That fixation comes in the form of a silent film star named Joan Cassidy. Joan was renowned for her beauty in her day as well as a troublesome personal life. In modern times, she is largely forgotten. Although not by Jade, who collects every bit of Joan memorabilia he can find and even has her image constantly playing on a projector screen. But the result is not a simple infatuation. It is apparent early on in the narrative that this simulacrum of Joan has a life of its own. But so does Jade. At a local diner, he strikes up a relationship with a budding young writer named Rain. Jade the editor and Rain the writer could make quite the couple. But as luck would have it, the ghostly Joan is not keen on Jade pursuing other women. Whatever shall become of this strangest of love triangles? The answer unfolds in a great number of odd developments. From a detailed account of a handyman with a penchant for cigars to a flashback to Joan’s life in Hollywood, the story takes a number of sharp turns. Even minor details in the text, which is written in the form of a screenplay, allow for flights of fancy. Take, for instance, Jade’s boss who chooses to show his feelings with a chart of emojis. Though the tale is fluid, it is not without its dead ends. Footsteps are bluntly described as “spine-chilling,” and a young street tough with a “unique eye patch” is far duller than his costume would suggest. It is unclear at times whether readers should be afraid, amused, or simply perplexed. What is to be made of it all? Yet the world Nathan has constructed is original, even if it can be difficult at times to follow. While Jade’s relationship with a silver screen star is not The Purple Rose of Cairo, it winds up being, doggedly enough, something far, far stranger.
An inventive, if unsteady, tale of misplaced affection.Pub Date: July 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-984531-97-1
Page Count: 184
Publisher: XlibrisUS
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2019
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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