Perfect for Trekkies and Donkey Kong fanatics, but a postmodern yawn that will sedate most normal readers.
Rambling debut about a West Coast slacker’s obsession with a video game.
Adam Pennyman went to college and become just literate enough to find Deep Meaning in his deepest desires—having to do with video games. Born in 1971, Adam came of age during the Golden Age of these games, and his life’s work becomes the compilation of a Catalogue of Obsolete Entertainments: a Leonard Maltin–ish sort of guide to every video game ever made. To finance the project, Adam takes work where he can find it. He gets a job with an American video producer in Warsaw and lives overseas just long enough to pick up a Polish girlfriend. Later, he moves to Los Angeles and becomes a copywriter for Portal Entertainment. It’s a lousy job, but he soon finds its one saving grace: Portal owns the rights to Lucky Wander Boy, an obscure 1983 Japanese video game that has become, since its disappearance, a kind of Holy Grail for videoheads the world over. Suddenly, Adam has new purpose in his life: He needs to stop the vulgarians at Portal from desecrating Lucky Wander Boy by turning it into a film concept (“Lucky Wander Boy epitomizes our struggles, our confusion, our persistence in the face of opponents we cannot even see, much less understand. It means something”), and he needs to find a way to get to the secret Third Level of the game. His quest brings him to the enigmatic and beautiful Araki Itachi, Lucky Wander Boy’s designer, who shows him how entering the Third Level is a spiritual quest that can’t be undertaken lightly. But Adam, not to be put off, is ready to suffer for his quest.
Perfect for Trekkies and Donkey Kong fanatics, but a postmodern yawn that will sedate most normal readers.Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-452-28394-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Plume
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2002
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 strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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