by Douglas Richardson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 23, 2009
An artful, beguiling voyage to a place no one wants to go.
A jumpy, bare-bones plunge into the vortex of one man’s madness.
In staccato chapters dealt out like a deck of cards–snappy, latent, repeating–Richardson tracks Zachary R.’s descent into psychosis. It is not a combustible event, but rather quotidian, and its very everydayness makes it especially creepy and troubling. Richardson explores the faults and folds of Zachary’s life–his father’s obsession with chess, his mother’s comic-but-for-its-ramifications death, the concussive darkness of his marriage, his daughter’s colorful waywardness–in writing that has the elemental quality and dreamy, out-of-body remoteness of black-and-white photography. The author frequently makes forays into an experimental tone, as if tasting the words–“She returned home like scurvy over anemia” or “the private nature of file clerks.” Though Richardson keeps a tight rein on his metaphors, an occasional hackneyed “reverent as stained glass at dawn” also crops up. Repetition is a powerful leitmotif in the author’s arsenal–“He considered the definition of insanity: ‘to do the same thing over and over and expect different results.’ ”–and he deploys it with a Hitchcockian fatality. He introduces Zachary’s madness and then circles back to introduce it again. Diverting customers appear and reappear to usher Zachary toward his rewards, talismanic elements hit the reader like doomful claps of thunder–brass knuckles, chess pieces, rivers and women. Richardson tenders characters that, due to the story’s brevity and swiftness, are quickly sympathetic and pack a compressed punch. It is not much of a stretch to identify with Zachary’s helpless gibbering, and his masochistic wife (“she received her beating, which made her whirl and pop”) is plain unnerving. Episodes of bleak humor lighten Zachary’s passage–a snail crawling the grounds of the asylum speaks to the patients, “but would do so selectively so as not to worsen their already fragile psyches.” Still, this Mobius strip of misery will inevitably take a detour to Zachary’s oblivion.
An artful, beguiling voyage to a place no one wants to go.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-9842424-1-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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