James can be entertaining, and he may stir warm memories of academic satires by Kingsley Amis, Mary McCarthy, or Randall...
A debate over erecting statues to honor two British university heads reveals some of the farcical ambitions, bureaucracy, and cant that are found only in academia.
Welsh crime writer James (First Fix Your Alibi, 2016, etc.), known for the Harpur and Iles series, posits two provincial universities in one city with opposing reactions to government austerity in the 1980s. Under the bumptious Lawford Chote, Sedge is millions over budget, while Victor Tane has kept Charter Mill’s finances in line with reality. The story moves back and forth between 1987, when Chote is mulling unrealistic plans to take over the other school, and 2014, when a committee of the schools—which in fact were merged under Tane—is mulling whether statues planned for Chote and Tane should occupy one plinth or two and on which campus they should reside. Readers will simply have to suspend disbelief in the idea that two provincial university principals would deserve statues under any government budget. Some of the humor is rather forced, but the committee meetings are often funny in their deadpan mockery of self-important educators given license to opine. One character is so perfectly absurd it’s hard to read him without having the image of Stephen Fry constantly in mind. Another humorous thread begins with a talk on Lady Chatterley’s Lover by Martin Moss in which he refers to some physical variation by the gamekeeper and the lady with a phrase that manages to arouse Chote’s wife from her snoring, gin-deadened state in the lecture hall’s front row. Principal Chote believes thereafter that Moss is something special, while allusions to his Chatterley trick pepper the novel.
James can be entertaining, and he may stir warm memories of academic satires by Kingsley Amis, Mary McCarthy, or Randall Jarrell, but his effort isn’t up to that pantheon.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8642-2
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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