A collection of diverse literary offerings that lacks a coherent structure.
This debut philosophical miscellany includes story fragments, a film treatment, poems, a two-act play, and letters to the editor.
Presented without any framing material, this hodgepodge becomes tough to decipher. Several themes do become apparent: fulmination against society’s restrictions; a writer called Terrence F. Hill; a mysterious figure, Godot-like, called Marcel; the nature of art, spirituality, and sanity. The book begins with a one-page episode centered on an unnamed man, head of the Rangoon police force and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, who uses his acceptance speech to say that he’s being called a great man only after he learned to hate. Next is an epistolary chapter in which Hill, author of novels including The Heart of a Poet, complains of being persecuted “in the thoughts of the devil, or evil, upon all God or nature would allow to receive the thoughts.” (This book exists, and Love’s work quotes from it, but the author never directly identifies himself with Hill.) Next is a film treatment in which a priest blames himself for not rebelling as a boy and bemoans his “tired heart”: “I feel like I’ve been dragging a wounded soldier along with me most of my life. He begged me to leave him behind—but I wouldn’t.” This image does have power, but Love weakens it through explanation: “The wounded soldier stands for the values of the family—and the laws and values that are the foundation of civilization.” A play follows, much in the vein of French absurdists (the author insists otherwise), with some effective dialogue among the confusion: “He lived in a - 30 - Cent - Bus - Ticket—Reality (Pauses) A rider in life, who stayed on the same vehicle and never had to upgrade his fare; he thought he stood on the stilting songs of life.” The film treatment starring the conflicted priest is repeated verbatim; other pieces follow, some looping back to earlier concerns, others seeming quite random, like a medical report in French. The book needs a strong editor to fix distracting errors of spelling, capitalization, and punctuation (for example, “André Sakorov the soviet dissedent wrote at essay in 1958, that was published around the world and was a sensation”).
A collection of diverse literary offerings that lacks a coherent structure.Pub Date: Aug. 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5462-8164-1
Page Count: 108
Publisher: AuthorHouseUK
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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