An unusual bildungsroman that mostly transcends the limitations of its formats.
In two linked novellas with strict word/character limits, Sanderson (Theatre/State Univ. of New York, Oswego; Gorilla Theater, 2003) playfully narrates the coming-of-age of a New Jersey high school student.
The work’s two sections originated as an Esquire magazine contest entry and a Twitter account. For the competition, Sanderson submitted 79/79/’79, a novella set in 1979 and composed of 79 numbered, titled chapters of 79 words each. He follows this with @1000thenovel, containing 1,000 tweets. Both share a protagonist—not the titular Judah but his best friend, Moe Tazwell, a brainy junior at McTierney High. Shifting among third-person, first-person, and first-person plural narration, the scattershot chapters nevertheless build a coherent picture of a set of students who slack off and show initiative in roughly equal measure. Moe plays the bass, works at an ice cream shop, and drinks; his friends study Latin, wear deerstalker hats, and write for the Alternative Literary Magazine. Various love interests come and go, with sex an ever present taunt. Judah and Moe set up a debate team and take home trophies. Meanwhile, Moe’s brother Taz turns delinquent, painting graffiti and making drug pipes. The 79/79/’79 chapters are more successful than the tweets, though both novellas involve sudden shifts, lacking the descriptive passages that function as transitions in most novels. The best chapter is “Magister Musicae,” a verse tribute to the music teacher. Stand-out tweets often showcase condensed metaphors, as in “Reading Kerouac…was like a cool primer in independence.” A pastoral interlude, when Moe visits a friend’s uncle’s farm in Virginia, provides a welcome contrast to the urban setting. Overall, there is perhaps a vague sense that the title—a nod to The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao—and structure came first and a linguistically effusive but somewhat plot-light story was developed to fit. The 140-character cast of @1000thenovel (to match tweets’ 140 “characters”) requires inserting many irrelevant, one-dimensional figures. Moe himself, though, is well-realized: both emblematic of his time and an outlier, especially as he jets off to Paris instead of attending college.
An unusual bildungsroman that mostly transcends the limitations of its formats.Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9861445-4-7
Page Count: 214
Publisher: Sagging Meniscus Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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