An amusing, if occasionally implausible, coming-of-age travel adventure.
Two teenage boys see the many facets of 1950s America in Buzzard’s caper-filled debut novel.
Young Texans Tim and Hect are friends despite being from different sides of the tracks. After they burn down an empty shack, they think that they’ve accidentally killed a homeless man, so they go on the run. Intending to separately hitchhike their way to El Paso, they each run into increasingly intriguing and bizarre strangers. Tim winds up in Colorado, and then New Mexico, hitching rides with a touring band and the rich guardian of a Japanese World War II general’s son. Hect falls into the path of T.J. and Becca, a father-and-daughter grifter team, who adopt him into their plans. Becca’s intense desire to be a movie star eventually leads her to run away with Hect; soon, they meet up with Tim, and the trio try to con their way through Juarez, Mexico, but quickly run into difficulty. Tim and Hect’s friendship is threatened by jealousy and resentment, and they soon find themselves in bigger trouble than they could ever have imagined. When they split up once more, Tim must do whatever he can to survive his trip home. The author admits to drawing inspiration from Mark Twain, and his protagonists are something of a mid-20th century Tom and Huck. Yet the real strength of the story doesn’t come from Tim and Hect themselves; their mishaps, close calls, and stereotypical rich-kid and poor-kid mannerisms may strain readers’ belief. Instead, the book’s power comes from the colorful characters that the boys meet on their adventures. The two cut a vibrant swath through the United States and Mexico, running into a diverse cross section of humanity, and these background players, and the lessons that they teach (or fail to teach), manage to keep the tale from feeling like an obvious rehash of Twain’s work.
An amusing, if occasionally implausible, coming-of-age travel adventure.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1500385279
Page Count: 242
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2015
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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