A buoyant farce that intelligently captures the current crisis of American higher education.
A college dean with a checkered past confronts challenges at a failing university in this debut novel.
Connor Ransom’s first career as a minister ended spectacularly: He had an affair with a parishioner, Lisa Nordeen, whose husband, Ned, jumped off a bridge after discovering her indiscretion. Ned survived the fall, but died by suicide later, after Connor skipped town with help of his boss, Sterling Holmes. Connor started over as a professor of religion at Ocotillo University, an unheralded college in New Mexico that’s fraught with internal dysfunction. Its president, Walter Driscoll, elevates Connor to the position of dean after only two semesters and promptly retires, leaving the professor to fend for himself. But when Connor’s old boss, now called Sterling Holmes-Ortega after getting married, astonishingly becomes the college president, it puts the new dean in a bind. Sterling becomes obsessed with quantifiable assessment of the college—his aim is to transform it into the nation’s “foremost Accountable University”—and he compels Connor to join his charge. Connor tries to unravel Sterling’s intentions with the help of Teresa Ramirez, a journalism professor with whom he enjoys an ill-defined romantic friendship. Author Charland has a gift for subtle satire, and he astutely exposes the comic absurdity that lies at the heart of the “rhetoric of bureaucrats”—especially the high-minded, academic variety. He’s a retired college professor, and he has a feel for the bizarre machinations of academia, showing them to employ a peculiar combination of intellectual power and administrative fecklessness. At the heart of the story is his grim but insightful diagnosis of the higher education industry, which he portrays as increasingly expensive but more incapable of fulfilling its mission. Overall, Charland’s satirical sendup is worth reading for its wry wit, but its unflinching but still-hopeful account of contemporary university life makes it memorable.
A buoyant farce that intelligently captures the current crisis of American higher education.Pub Date: June 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63293-231-0
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Sunstone Press
Review Posted Online: July 25, 2019
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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