A smart, layered satire for historians and cultural critics alike.
Humor comes together in a sometimes-dark, often playful, and ultimately humanist satire of technology, media, and politics past and present in this fascinating debut novel by Schneider, a journalist and political commentator.
The story opens as the author clears out his grandfather’s attic. But the unenviable chore yields something unexpected: his great-grandfather’s writing and a strange, typewriterlike device that seems to have been part of a miraculous turn-of-the-century internet. The writings make up the rest of the novel as the great-grandfather, Sebastian Schneider, navigates his menial career as a typist for the Milwaukee Post in 1916. When Sebastian receives the device—called a Finger-Phone—from a colleague, he begins blogging his thoughts and feelings on the matters of the day, from women’s suffrage to the specter of Prohibition. Throughout, the text delivers plenty of laughs, portraying historical events without the perspective of hindsight and understanding and viewing Sebastian’s 20th-century ideas through 21st-century technology. His misadventures range from trying to buy firewood through Tinder to click-bait articles and spam messages promising male enhancement. These jokes start to feel redundant after a while, but the novel’s effective, deadpan prose is still chuckleworthy, and Sebastian’s haplessness allows for plenty of situation comedy as well, like when he ends up drunk at a teetotaler rally. He uses his blog as an outlet to voice his opinions and share his misadventures, but as time goes on, he feels increasingly alone and disconnected. This idea isn’t particularly novel, but the story ultimately goes deeper and addresses why technology seems to yield these negative feelings. Indeed, while the reader laughs at Sebastian’s slip-ups and misunderstandings, the novel also indicts his sexism, self-certainty, and tendency to speak from ignorance. And at the same time, while the story mocks plenty of the more absurd aspects of the digital age, it also shows how Sebastian gains a genuine friendship through his online interactions—a relationship his own prejudices might have kept him from in the real world. In this way, the reader comes away with the sense that this is not a baldfaced indictment of technology but a nuanced treatment on the ways in which we abuse it.
A smart, layered satire for historians and cultural critics alike.Pub Date: Nov. 26, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-692-04447-6
Page Count: 271
Publisher: Pelham Press, LLC
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 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
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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