A collection that includes a baffling fantasia that mixes sexuality, dinosaurs, and a quasar.
A debut volume delivers a trio of irreverent short stories.
A small bar on Jefferson Avenue in New Orleans is the focal point of the main story in Uncle Mike’s collection of three sketches. At this bar, the longtime patrons spend their time swapping tales, ogling lovely barmaid Valerie, joking with drag queens, and speculating on the nature of the universe. Two such regulars, Al Token and Henry Schmitt, decide to attempt to confirm with experiments (conducted on rats they catch at the dump) a theory that sound waves from a quasar are responsible for “turning” so many of the bar’s new clients gay (at one point, a habitué asks, “It looks like this bar is becoming a gay bar. Why are there so many gay people these days?”). That sound doesn’t travel through space is never mentioned as an impediment to the theory. Al and Henry and their fellow customers theorize that this quasar may have made all the dinosaurs gay before they became extinct, and they don’t exempt one another from doubts —characters are suspected of being gay if they have flower gardens, for instance, and they’re flat-out assumed to be homosexual if they have the latest smartphones. The collection’s other tales, “To Be or Not To Be” and “Pilgrim’s Day,” are lighthearted trifles, but the title story is an odious piece. The author prefaces it with a warning: “If you are not gay and want to stay that way, read this book today”—leaving few doubts about his two main implications: that there’s something very wrong with being gay, and that this is a work intended for readers who share that belief. The first is of course untrue (a thing that shouldn’t need restating in 2017) and the second warrants serious reflection—who would find this schoolboy mockery even comprehensible (flower gardens?), much less amusing.
A collection that includes a baffling fantasia that mixes sexuality, dinosaurs, and a quasar.Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63524-355-0
Page Count: -
Publisher: LitFire Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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