A struggling arts-commissioner and his performance-artist wife pit themselves against a weapons-testing Army base—in this bleak and largely unsatisfying second novel by the author of Desire Provoked (1986). Jon Case has enjoyed better posts, but the specter of dwindling funds for the arts nationwide and his own seemingly permanent unemployment convince him to accept the unlikely position of culture booster for Tilton, Nevada, 20 miles east of the Nevada Test Site. Populated entirely by military personnel and those who serve them, Tilton's residents are anxious about budget reductions and layoffs with the end of the Cold War. Jon has been hired to ease their anxiety through art, but even as he and his family set up house in a trailer on the edge of the desert, they feel the area's toxic atmosphere take hold. Underground nuclear explosions that shatter the desert silence, houses that sink into toxic goo, and the sudden death of a new friend whose brain was ``hard- boiled'' by an exhaust pipe from a plutonium-processing furnace— all prompt Jon's wife to organize women's protest dances at the edge of the Test Site, his daughter to escape into a superficial social life with local boys destined some day to man the nation's missile silos, and his emotionally disturbed son to dream of a hairy creature telling them that the planet is doomed. As Jon learns of a particularly evil government project nearby, he pits himself more determinedly against the gruff, monomaniacal military personnel who hired him. He'll lose his struggle, of course—but at least he's allowed a few family pleasures as the military men lead him and, it's implied, the rest of the country, to an early grave. Daugherty's simplistic portrayal of artists as sensitive and wise, and Army men as evil and greedy, does disservice to his aims. A more perceptive and honest look at the world of nuclear arms and their protectors would be welcome.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-393-03837-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1996
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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