Dark, subversive and disquieting fiction for readers ready to go all the way down.
Twenty stories of embattled brothers and twisted sisters hand-selected by Palahniuk and two comrades from his online community The Cult.
Transgressive fiction is a much broader label than many readers realize, encompassing everything from Hubert Selby Jr.’s gritty Last Exit to Brooklyn to Alissa Nutting’s much-debated Tampa. Palahniuk (Doomed, 2013, etc.) is arguably the most capable modern practitioner of the style and certainly its most visible champion. “We return to troubling films and books because they don’t pander to us—their style and subject matter challenge, but to embrace them is to win something worth having for the rest of our lives,” he proclaims. “The difficult, the new and novel establish their own authority.” That said, these creative endeavors remain mostly male and uniquely grotesque, inhabiting their own peculiar orbit in the universe of American lit. Many are about self-harm, resembling some of the stories—like the infamous nausea-inducing “Guts,” for example—from Palahniuk’s Haunted (2005). In Neil Krolicki’s “Live This Down,” a clique of teenage girls find themselves humiliated after a botched suicide attempt. There’s also the disgruntled retail clerk in Richard Lemmer’s “Ingredients,” scarred inside and out after a dare goes wrong. Other stories, including Matt Egan’s “A Vodka Kind of Girl” and Brandon Tietz’s “Dietary,” explore the fear and loathing between women and body image. Almost always there’s a tendency to examine the dichotomy between the damage we do to our bodies and the strange secrecy of our inner monologues. That’s certainly true in Phil Jourdan’s “Mind and Soldier,” about a disabled vet, and Keith Buie’s “The Routine,” recounting the sins of an overworked graveyard shift pharmacist. Some stories are subtle, like Chris Lewis Carter’s “Charlie,” recounting the cycle of animal abuse. Others are not—see the casual zoophilia of Brien Piechos’ “Heavier Petting” and the collection’s closer, “Zombie Whorehouse” by Daniel W. Broallt. No, it’s not a metaphor.
Dark, subversive and disquieting fiction for readers ready to go all the way down.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-60542-734-8
Page Count: 310
Publisher: Medallion Press
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
PROFILES
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
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
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