edited by William Cobb ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 20, 2018
A meandering, comically flat sendup of higher education.
Cobb’s farcical novel explores the sexually dysfunctional dynamics of a college campus.
Lily Putnam just began writing her dissertation on Toni Morrison and lands a job as an instructor in an English department at Lakewood College, a small liberal arts college hidden in the outskirts of the Florida Panhandle. She’s a striking beauty and enjoys flaunting it. Lily quickly finds herself well-hunted erotic quarry—she begins a casual sexual relationship with Brasfield Finch, the department’s writer-in-residence, and something even more fleeting with the aggressive but impotent department chair, Rufus Doublet. She even sleeps with a 19-year-old sophomore jock, David Godby, who is as strikingly handsome as he is numbingly stupid. Meanwhile, Finch is incensed to learn that the college is spending a small fortune to bring Lenora Hart—a famous novelist—to campus to speak. He had a brief fling with her 15 years ago and detests the book that won her near universal adulation as well as wealth. He tries to block her visitation, but President Steagall is able to blackmail him into quiescence—Finch has a reputation on campus as an alcoholic who routinely shirks his professional duties. The plot swings uneasily between erotic frivolity and savage sexual assault—the campus is beleaguered by student streakers and then is embroiled in potential legal action when a freshman is gang-raped by the members of a popular men’s social club. Cobb (Sweet Home: Stories of Alabama, 2013, etc.) was a writer-in-residence at Alabama’s University of Montevallo for over a decade and displays a keen grasp of the comic absurdity of campus politics. He also imaginatively conjures an eccentric cast, including a racist dean who falls in love with Lily almost upon first sight, and a local priest, Hamner Curbs, who is a closeted and shockingly reckless sexual predator. The plot, however, is plodding and aimless, a narratively peripatetic amble from one vaudevillian moment to the next. The story is built around Lily, who seems shallowly defined by her erotic power. The reader learns virtually nothing about her, her background, or why she chose literature as a profession. She rarely speaks about books or art or shows any abiding interest in either. In fact, no one in the English department seems all that keen to discuss literature, though there’s never a deficit of interest in prurient gossip. Also, the attempts at humor are more ribald than funny, and the descriptions of numerous sexual encounters in the work manage to be both peculiar and banal. For example, Finch lands himself in hot water after an indiscreet remark during a writing workshop, requesting a female student revise a story she wrote starring her cat. He jokes: “Re-write your story, Miss Carlton, and give us some conflict and resolution. Don’t just tell us, but show us. Then we, the readers, will love your pussy, too, so much we’ll want to kiss it.”
A meandering, comically flat sendup of higher education.Pub Date: May 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-60489-203-1
Page Count: 226
Publisher: Livingston Press
Review Posted Online: March 12, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Share your opinion of this book
More by William Cobb
BOOK REVIEW
by William Cobb
BOOK REVIEW
by William Cobb
by Paulo Coelho & translated by Margaret Jull Costa ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 1993
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
Share your opinion of this book
More by Paulo Coelho
BOOK REVIEW
by Paulo Coelho ; illustrated by Christoph Niemann ; translated by Margaret Jull Costa
BOOK REVIEW
by Paulo Coelho ; translated by Eric M.B. Becker
BOOK REVIEW
by Paulo Coelho ; translated by Zoë Perry
More About This Book
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Awards & Accolades
Likes
50
Our Verdict
GET IT
Kirkus Reviews'
Best Books Of 2015
Kirkus Prize
winner
National Book Award Finalist
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
Share your opinion of this book
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Trouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Trouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.