Slight but fun. A little misguided, though, since everyone knows the Rolling Stones are the walking undead.
In which the Fab Four reveal a fondness for munching on human brains in between gigs.
We’ve endured a flood of vampire books for the past few years, so it may be time to give zombies a chance to work their literary magic. Prolific ghostwriter and music journalist Goldsher (Modest Mouse: A Pretty Good Read, 2006, etc.) makes a reasonable case in this essentially trivial but entertaining novel, which posits that, way back in October 1940, the big cheese among a tribe of suppurating, gooey zombies that lived in the sewers of Liverpool stole newborn John Lennon away from his mother, Julia, and made him one of the bunch. Comments interlocutor and zombie-ologist Lyman Cosgrove: “Being that Lennon was all of five hours old when he was attacked by the First, I feel comfortable saying that the First used a spell on the baby rather than an assault.” Little Johnny knows no such niceties, and he quite capably takes his place among the Liverpudlian undead, who are the toppermost of the poppermost when it comes to the zombie pecking order—as Cosgrove notes, they’re skilled at hypnosis and telekinesis, and they can reattach any limb that happens to fall off, except for the heads. Now a young man and a veteran of a band that he wanted to call The Maggots (“I thought the Maggots was a brilliant name. Still do, actually”), John does a couple of big things: he resurrects Julia from the dead, and he recruits a sweet youth named Paul McCartney to help him take over the world—but not before making an unholy mess of his firm young flesh. And, with George (who, still a schoolboy, has to pester Paul to kill him) and Ringo, they take over the world, with no end of mayhem, giving new meaning to the notion of the primal scream. Goldsher turns in a classic rags-to-riches tale of aspiration and success that would do Horatio Alger proud, punctuated by no end of gore.
Slight but fun. A little misguided, though, since everyone knows the Rolling Stones are the walking undead.Pub Date: June 22, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4391-7792-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2010
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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