A heartbreaking and delicately composed story about the pain of ennui.
In Mattessich’s (Point Guard, 2017) novel, a shiftless young Navy seaman goes AWOL and takes refuge with an artist uncle, who’s similarly adrift.
Twenty-something Jess Cooper is a “sweet, rudderless kid” in the Navy. Many of the adults in his life felt that he had “no fire in him…and he had no particular reason to think they were wrong.” The sensitive, artistic young man still seems unsure what to do with his life, but he feels no special urgency to figure it out. However, as a result of a bureaucratic error, he’s presented with an opportunity to escape the Navy’s despotic discipline, so he goes absent without leave while his ship is docked in San Diego. He seeks out his uncle Milo Manning, a “beach bum” who fritters away his days “time surfing, making art…and eking out a livelihood as best as he could.” Milo lives in East Brother, a California beach town that was once a “haven for bohemians and mystics looking for their chance at Shangri-La,” but it’s now overrun by development and new-money millionaires. In fact, Harry Contento, an unscrupulous real estate agent, is relentlessly trying to pry Milo’s property from his hands. It turns out that Milo is just as lost as his nephew is, but he introduces Jess to a “mogul in the making” who has much bigger dreams: “Jack the Cat,” a legendary heroin addict who managed to become the head of a criminal narcotic empire. Mattessich skillfully constructs an ambient mood of aimlessness in this novel. Along the way, he gets across the extraordinary sense of alienation of those who lack ambition in a careerist age. Jack is an intelligently conceived foil to Jess and Milo, as he’s preternaturally motivated and always ready to leap headlong into new and uncertain experiences. Jess is neither dumb nor lazy, but he is irremediably average; indeed, his ordinariness seems to be the source of his decency and his despair, and the author depicts this conundrum with impressive subtlety. Milo, meanwhile, is shown to be caught between the bliss of freedom and the onerous weight of purposelessness, and Mattessich thoughtfully and poetically captures his predicament: “Life surrounds him, root and branch, in tendrils of smilax and the snares that spiders weave. It turns in circles of awesome fecundity. But he senses its remoteness, too, like a humming you hear only as the susurration of blood in veins.” Mattessich is at his best when he plumbs the depths of his characters’ brokenness and limns the elusiveness of redemption: “[Milo] doesn't know where he stands anymore, or if there is even any place to stand. That margin has become a surface, and it flattens out a little more each day, robbing him of a vital third dimension.” Overall, this novel offers readers an unflinchingly realistic and achingly sad depiction of a profound lonesomeness—one that can’t be remedied by company but, at the same time, isn’t completely hopeless, either.
A heartbreaking and delicately composed story about the pain of ennui.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-578-57261-1
Page Count: 231
Publisher: Urizen Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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
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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