Fans of Westerns will enjoy this unusual, if flawed, contribution to the genre.
In Barry’s debut novel, a billionaire playboy trades a luxurious but ultimately meaningless life for one filled with adventure when a scandal tarnishes his reputation.
In 1931, Jamison Jackson Logan III is the president of a prestigious New York City law firm, Logan, Marshall & Partners; he has $1 billion in the bank and has just been named Bachelor of the Year by Indigo-Rouge Magazine. But at a banquet to receive the Firm of the Year Award from Law and Standards magazine, he finds out that his partner embezzled nearly $20 million. In the wake of the scandal, he flees to Paris, but it’s not far enough to escape. While returning to New York on an ocean liner, he decides to fake his death when there’s a minor collision with a fishing trawler. He then begins a Travels with Charley–esque adventure, traveling west in a van with a stray Airedale named Tag. In Tempe, Arizona, engine trouble lands him at a small outfitter store owned by Doc Boone and his daughter, Glory. With nowhere else to be, he decides to stick around and enjoy the scenery—and perhaps woo Doc’s enchanting daughter. Then a skull is found in the desert with a bullet-sized hole in it. Logan embraces his new identity as “Jack McCall” and helps track down the bandits responsible. Although Logan begins his hero’s journey as a Jay Gatsby–like playboy, Barry quickly transforms him into a Steinbeck-ian wanderer. This is, at its heart, an original Western, sunbaked and full of rattlesnakes, and the author truly does the vanishing genre justice. That said, the overall narrative is weakened by some frankly odd choices, including the inclusion of unnecessary clip art; Tag’s inner monologue, appearing only in one passage, wondering, “What is the purpose of my life?”; and intermittent dialogue indicators that are reminiscent of a play script: “Doc: ‘Excuse my sassy daughter fer her frankness, Son. Glory, that was rude and uncalled for.’ ” A stronger edit might have corrected such formatting irregularities and allowed readers to focus more on the solid storytelling and complex characters.
Fans of Westerns will enjoy this unusual, if flawed, contribution to the genre.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4809-1170-3
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Dorrance Publishing Co.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 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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