A mystery that thoughtfully reflects on the hazy line between suspicion and reckless mania.
A reality TV star grieves over the death of his best friend and increasingly suspects foul play in this novel.
In 2025, Jason Debord stars on the TV show Beached, a Survivor-like competition that pits contestants against one another on a remote island, with each vying to be the last one remaining. During its taping, he forges a close friendship with Billy Gerding, and the pair form an alliance on the show, based on strategy and mutual trust. Then Billy suddenly and mysteriously dies, and the producers quickly say that it was a suicide. Jason feels anguish over the loss, but also nagging suspicions that Billy’s death wasn’t accidental. Debut author Hacker convincingly portrays his protagonist’s inner turmoil. Jason thinks that maybe he was killed by another contestant—and Nick, the “villain of the season,” is the prime suspect in this theory. Or maybe the network conspired to kill Billy, he thinks—although this hypothesis lacks a likely motive. Jason gradually reveals his concerns to all who know him—he even contacts Billy’s estranged sister, Emily—but his anxious musings are generally dismissed as flights of fancy. However, he simply can’t let the issue drop—especially after someone breaks into his home, and an aggressive driver forces him off the road. Meanwhile, Jason’s psychiatrist girlfriend Blake becomes increasingly concerned for his mental health. Then Jason uncovers evidence of a larger criminal conspiracy. Over the course of the story, Hacker cleverly shifts between various modes of narration—Jason’s journal entries, phone calls, and text exchanges, as well as third-person omniscience, and this stylistic choice allows the author to deftly compare a range of different perspectives. As a result, the novel artfully keeps the reader in a state of indecision, as Jason sometimes seems unhinged, but at other times perfectly rational. The overall pace of the plot is much too slow, however, and some readers may well tire of the tale about two-thirds of the way through. But overall, this whodunit is intelligently conceived and well-executed.
A mystery that thoughtfully reflects on the hazy line between suspicion and reckless mania.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73350-492-8
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Anywhere Press
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2019
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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