Often exciting and absorbing with a tough, hard-boiled style, but it could be more imaginative about future society.
An alcoholic detective investigating his ex-wife’s murder overturns evidence of a dangerous conspiracy in this debut noir-flavored sci-fi novel.
In the near future—only those over 65 can remember a world before the internet—three corporations control everything, and the biggest of these giants is Chicago-based Unitex. Nearly everyone wears implanted chips manufactured by the company to access information, entertainment, and communication. A few, like Chicago police detective Jack Waldron, prefer external links; radical group PURE, People United Resisting Enhancements, entirely opposes cybernetics. Ever since his young daughter died, for which he blames himself, and his divorce, Jack has retreated into whiskey and virtual reality replays of his best memories. But when his ex, Rebecca Witherspoon, is brutally raped and killed, Jack is drawn into a series of murder investigations and virtual worlds that at first seem unrelated. Though warned off, Jack keeps probing as the body count rises; he often encounters violence and danger, risking narrow escapes in search of the truth. With a few allies (or are they?), such as Cassandre “Cassie” Charbonneau—a PURE activist—Jack must crawl out of his whiskey bottle and confront both past and present to bring down a conspiracy bent on controlling all of humanity. In his novel, Lange combines the hard-boiled, fisticuffs atmosphere of pulp detective fiction with future-tech gizmos and accompanying paranoia. The near-future setting in roughly the early 2050s is close enough to readers’ own for its presentation of issues regarding surveillance and privacy to grab them. The author’s descriptions of virtual reality games, AI–controlled cars, and similar tech are engaging and well-written. But in ways large and small, the future hasn’t changed enough. An elderly battle-ax in hair curlers; sex workers named “Tiffany, Brandy, Amber”; a man who dislikes that his wife has more money than he does; a lesbian who’s criticized for “pretending to be” a man; a cinematic showdown in a warehouse—too many elements of this tale seem old-fashioned or clichéd today, much less 30-plus years from now.
Often exciting and absorbing with a tough, hard-boiled style, but it could be more imaginative about future society.Pub Date: March 19, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9994370-0-1
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Pacific Arts Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2018
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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