A valiant, earnest effort trumped by its unevenness.
This political thriller set amid the presidential election of 2020 envisions an America further besieged by many of today’s issues.
In Kolhatkar’s debut, America of the near future must once again elect a president to wrangle the economic and political quagmires that threaten to wreck the country and the world. A colorful cadre of politicos runs the country or wants to: the incumbent Republican president with malignant cancer, the Democratic front-runner entrapped in an affair, a candidate nearly assassinated and a billionaire financier named Frank Stein who crusades for truth by railing against Washington insiders and Wall Street fat cats. As if the political climate isn’t unstable enough, the U.S. of 2020 faces a financial meltdown, increasingly antagonistic China and Iran, national protests that verge on riots and rising unemployment—sound familiar? There is hope, however, in Sen. Olivia Allen, a fighter of the good fight, who appears as an unlikely and reluctant candidate to challenge the power-hungry vice president, but only if she can overcome her imposter syndrome—she suffers an agonizing internal battle to justify her accomplishments. It’s an imposing backdrop for any novelist, let alone a first-timer—thankfully, Kolhatkar comprehends the practicalities of political strategy and economic theory, along with their dependent relationship, which he uses to inform his prose with thoughtful and matter-of-fact observations. But his tone is often too didactic; it compares, somewhat ironically, to media pundit characterization of Frank Stein as “too professorial.” Several sections intend to weave information about electoral processes and political history into the larger narrative, yet the inelegant entwining stumbles rather than flows. Coincidentally, the narrative, although set in 2020, is composed from a contemporary consciousness. Somewhat predictable economic and political prophecies have come true, while odd references to current media trends and popular culture icons—like Facebook and Rihanna—will tend to keep readers grounded in 2012. The narrative merely glances at the years between now and 2020, as if that time fills in only to establish the admittedly well-rendered, complex political climate of the future.
A valiant, earnest effort trumped by its unevenness.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-1463796716
Page Count: 388
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2012
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 presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
PERSPECTIVES
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