Satirist Sharpe returns after a lengthy hiatus, anger undimmed, in an alternately cruel and hilarious tale of greed set in a contemporary Britain blighted by the appetites set loose during Margaret Thatcher's reign. Those familiar with Sharpe's previous work will not be disappointed. This tale, like his earlier novels (Wilt on High, 1984, etc.), features violent slapstick (including a brilliantly sustained scene in which a violent, drunken husband has to contend with a surly watchdog, his wife's lesbian lover, and a drugged lout who has unknowingly crawled into bed with the wife); some spirited, acidic, precise portraits of authority gone amuck; and a grimly humorous skewering of human foibles. Although young Timothy Bright has served quite lucratively as a front man for some shady financial types during the go-go '80s, the crash in the early '90s leaves him broke. He secretly helps himself to some of his family's carefully hoarded capital and flees. The arrogant and not-very- bright Timothy bungles his getaway by running afoul of a powerful and thoroughly corrupt police superintendent. He ends up hiding out at Middenhall, a grotesque country house filled with an assortment of geriatric oddities and presided over by the formidable Miss Midden, and in the middle of a war. It turns out that the superintendent is determined to drive Miss Midden (his only opposition) from the county, the better to continue looting it. The apocalyptic climax involves a shoot-out between a police assault unit and one of the Middens, an addled hunter who mistakes them for terrorists. By the close, Sharpe, with obvious relish, has meted out punishment to the whole scapegrace lot—only the cool, practical Miss Midden survives unchanged. But while there are some wonderfully zany moments here, anger predominates. It's clear that Sharpe really is disgusted by his countrymen, whom he views as shallow, greedy, and dull. Too often, though, the anger overwhelms the satire. A ferociously inventive but uneven satire.
Pub Date: Nov. 11, 1997
ISBN: 0-87951-801-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1997
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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