Pearson's latest comedy of bad manners (Gospel Hour, 1991, etc.) confirms his status as a master storyteller. It's a southern tale of ``bloodlust and high humor, romance and betrayal'' that everywhere attests to its creator's expansive and magnanimous vision. Something of a murder mystery, this raucously funny novel is more focused than the usual Pearson narrative. But even this intrigue allows for his characteristic digressions, his elegant variations, and his ability to transform the vulgar into the sublime. Told by a amiable young police officer, this ``tale of woe'' concerns the death of a fellow cop. And as its solution reveals itself, it also exposes ``a community of passionate people who sometimes slaughtered each other for love.'' At the center of this small town's murderous spree is a comely woman who uses men for sport. A married cop, a local lowlife, and a spoiled rich kid all come to ruin, thanks to this mysterious vixen, who favored her men with Polaroid souvenirs. Along the way to the bloody denouement, we learn about the various other passions that lurk within this small southern community: the wife who gutted her womanizing husband like a pig; the local drunk who fancies himself a defiler of royalty; the dumpy middle-aged adulterers who run off together; the eccentric brothers who fight over tastes in film romance; the two slutty sisters who service men orally while they're driving; and the suspected moonshiners who are actually secret homosexual lovers. It's a sorry world of flatulent dogs, lonely old women, and uncontrollable body functions. And Pearson loves it all—the lurid and salacious, the peculiar follies of basically good folk. The hilarious coda finds the entire story reenacted for ``reality tv,'' that curious ``place where life and tv meet.'' The genius is not in the tale, but in the telling—generous in spirit, deft in design.
Pub Date: Jan. 7, 1993
ISBN: 0-8050-2200-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
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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