A potent and sobering wake-up call.
In a setting similar to Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, corporations suppress independent thought through a constant stream of media content.
In this novel, the year is 2048. The population of the international superstate known as Globalia is divided into the elite Establishment and the pedestrian Vues (a name derived from their status as viewers). Citizens experience the world through MyScreens or MyndScreens: devices that, depending on income, are worn as helmets or implanted directly into the brain. An individual’s activity is monitored by the SpeidrWeb™, and anomalies are retired to entertainment homes where content is streamed to them without pause. Vera works in the Department of Information, researching statistics for public announcements. Bored by the ceaseless barrage of infotainment and annoyed by her co-workers’ fixation with the reality TV series Big Mother Gets Real, she uses meditation to achieve a heightened awareness of the physical world. She becomes increasingly disillusioned with her work, realizing that while factually correct, the information broadcasted to the public is usually misleading. Her questioning soon leads her to other rebels, including a charming screenwriter named Chase, with whom Vera becomes romantically involved, and a mysterious legal expert whom she suspects is part of the legendary resistance group the Luddyte Sisterhood. Cressman (The Recall’s Broken Promise, 2007, etc.) draws heavily from the format of Nineteen Eighty-Four, complete with an internal manifesto explaining the history of the Globalian regime. In addition to addressing overstimulation and corporate control, he illustrates the future of social media, relationships, economics, agriculture, warfare, and the devolution of speech into a collection of emojicons. The world he creates is well developed, filled with clever commentary and leavened by satirical situations. But the execution suffers from occasional heavy-handedness. For instance, Vera’s observation that “No infotain firm, no avatar creator, not a single living person has yet created a sound as authentic as the laugh of a child” feels more sentimental than substantive. Although the plot will be very predictable to anyone familiar with Orwell’s writing, the conclusion still manages to deliver a powerful emotional wallop. This modern tribute brings a sense of relevance and urgency to a dystopian classic.
A potent and sobering wake-up call.Pub Date: April 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73395-670-3
Page Count: 318
Publisher: Poplar Leaf Press
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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