A sentimental, staccato love letter to baseball, fatherhood, and the passage of time.
A frustrated young writer discovers a surprising redemption when he moves back in with his dying father.
Duchovny (Holy Cow, 2015) follows up his whimsical debut with a far more substantive coming-of-age novel that started life over a decade ago as an unproduced screenplay centered on the infamous 1978 American League East tiebreaker between the Yankees and the Red Sox. Our introduction to this well-captured corner of Americana comes from Ted Fullilove, an Ivy League graduate who largely wastes his potential by smoking pot, tossing peanuts at Yankee Stadium, and puttering around with the Great American Novel. When Ted learns that his long-estranged father, Marty, is dying, he moves back in with the cantankerous old man. Marty is a throwback to another age, a former adman with a secretive past revealed when he asks his son to read the journals he wrote as a younger man. As Ted spends more time with his father, he develops a grudging respect for the profane Marty, whose belligerence belies a whip-smart mind and a deep love for the son he calls “Splinter.” Ted even gets surprised by his own romanticism when he falls for Mariana, a caretaker who warns Ted, “Death is not a story; it can’t be faked out. Death is real. You can’t really keep your father safe.” There’s a comic angle here, too. Marty’s health plummets whenever the Red Sox lose, so Ted mounts an ambitious campaign to fake a winning season with the help of Mariana and Marty’s elderly buddies. A truly funny moment comes later when Ted introduces Marty to the merits of marijuana. Readers who enjoy the story told here would be well-served by seeking out Duchovny’s 2004 directorial debut, House of D, which shares many of the same assets. Duchovny riffs heavily on familiar themes here but still deftly portrays bittersweet nostalgia without lapsing into saccharine theatricality.
A sentimental, staccato love letter to baseball, fatherhood, and the passage of time.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-374-11042-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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