The questionable medical practice of German neurologist Dr. Oskar Vogt extends from the 1890's to WW II—and by chronicling those decades in his knowledgeable, droll, and spirited first novel, Spengler offers an entertainment following Europe's history from last century's end to the moment before Nazi defeat. Not a Freudian he, from the outset of his career Dr. Vogt believes genius is a physiological presence in the brain that can be discovered through dissection and analysis—and so his fin-de- siäcle lament may be understandable that ``at a time like ours...there is a general shortage of elite brains available for scientific research.'' To support himself in the highly competitive medical world, Vogt treats neurasthenia—particularly in well-off patients like Margarethe Krupp (of the great industrialist family), whose husband's consuming homosexuality threatens to bring about family scandal and confusion—and reveals Dr. Vogt's ability to survive and flourish by such means as may be available. The times move forward as Dr. Vogt attempts to do the same himself: the reader first glimpses Lenin at an intellectual gathering outside Geneva in 1905; WW I comes and goes (``The recent war was a disgrace as far as brains are concerned''); Bolshevism triumphs; and with the death of Lenin in 1924, it is the by-then-renowned Dr. Vogt who is called upon to make 30,000 microscopic slides from frontal slices of the great leader's brain (``I've never seen such collapsed convolutions'')—with political results that will later lead to richly absurd comedies of jealousy, suspicion, espionage, and paranoia as Russia and Germany draw apart in preparation for WW II, with the aging Dr. Vogt caught up—and dropped (``No, Vogt had really become superfluous'')—by ideological forces as absurd at bottom as his own scientific theories had ever been. If not always limpid in the reading, a brilliantly tapestried and deadpan look at a half-century possibly as hilarious as it was mad.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-374-18502-6
Page Count: 332
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1993
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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