Intriguing ideas, but teasing out meaning from this confusing presentation becomes a challenge.
A superhero comic and what it signifies to a writer who can’t draw becomes the meditative center of this graphic novel.
This unusual work consists of three parts. The first is notes for a comic book roughly indicated on blank forms with spaces for publisher (“HEX”), title, issue, and page number, beginning with two unnumbered pages filled with the word “black” and synonyms (blackness, dark, darkness, inky), along with the word “CORY.” Numbered pages 1 to 20 contain few drawings except for a superhero silhouette, mostly consisting of captions, dialogue, and instructions for the artist on what to draw. For example, “a chance comet shields Doby from the blast” or “still supposed to look like half a skull.” Four more pages, still presented as if on the blank forms, provide a full-color, dialogue-free sequence that bears a tangential relationship to the foregoing. In the last section, titled “My Hero” and no longer using the form backdrop, the author provides autobiographical details about the conception of this story and his growth as a writer, giving thanks to those who contributed. It’s hard to figure out what’s going on in this puzzling offering from Jones (Mapping the Interior, 2017, etc.). Readers gather that Lance and Kenneth, two high school friends, are the creators of a comic book called Dr. Never, “foiler of dastardly deeds,” featuring Stardillo, Korga, and Rexo. They’ve succeeded enough to have a merchandising deal and action figures. This is mixed up with memories and present-day reflections in a baffling manner, with elliptical statements that leave out information (who is Cory, mentioned early on?) or make the reader hunt for it. (The best guidance is the book’s back cover blurb, which explains that Jones and his best friend, who once dreamed of collaborating on superhero comics, now have children of their own who play together, as they once did, and with action figures based on the author’s own comic book.) In addition, the emphasis on how unusual it is to write but not draw a comic seems odd, given the enormous success of Harvey Pekar.
Intriguing ideas, but teasing out meaning from this confusing presentation becomes a challenge.Pub Date: June 27, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9986667-0-9
Page Count: 46
Publisher: Hex Publishers
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.
Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.
Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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