May have some ethnographic value as a name-dropping record of early L.A. punk, but overly clever and utterly unpersuasive as...
Sex, drugs and self-awareness amid the 1980s punk scene, in an idiosyncratic second novel from Hillsbery (War Boy, 2000).
Abandoned by junkie parents, Rockets trades the custodial embrace of the state for homelessness and hustling in Hollywood even before he hits puberty. He finally feels a sense of belonging in the L.A. punk scene that produced X, Flipper, The Circle Jerks and The Germs. Indeed, the story gets its title from a Germs single and its impetus from the 1980 suicide of the band’s front man, Darby Crash. It may be morning in Reagan’s America, but it’s always dark in underground L.A., and Rockets’ existence is a nightmare—enlightened only occasionally by fragments of sweet dreams—until he’s saved one golden California morning by lesbian folksinger Phranc. The author mostly refrains from easy pathos in depicting his almost-30 protagonist, but he fails to bring Rockets to life, in part because the boy’s history remains mostly obscured, and in part because the narrative voice is thoroughly unconvincing. Hillsbery’s prose ranges from cutely opaque to merely cute, and it never seems to match the language available or likely to be compelling to a punk-rock kid 20 years ago. Instead, Rockets talks like a biker or a beatnik or a Tin Pan Alley songsmith. His stream-of-consciousness is unintended kitsch—and immensely wearying. Hillsbery achieves his only moment of real beauty or truth in his opening pages when Rockets offers a list of everything he hates. In the midst of this childishly nihilistic—and, therefore, truly punk—catechism, Rockets exclaims that he detests poseurs, which is to say that he is disgusted when external presentation fails to match inner reality. That being the case, it’s difficult to imagine that he would have any use for What We Do Is Secret.
May have some ethnographic value as a name-dropping record of early L.A. punk, but overly clever and utterly unpersuasive as a novel.Pub Date: April 19, 2005
ISBN: 0-8129-7309-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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