A visually engaging, irrefutably intoxicating adventure.
First-time novelist Swamp weaves an epic tale of a crew sent to assess a garbage heap in the Pacific Ocean—and to learn what happened to the last crew sent to investigate it.
Debris in the North Pacific Gyre has formed a mass three times the size of Texas. After a group scientists sent to the gyre mysteriously vanishes, the president of the United States opts to assign the task to “expendable volunteers” instead of wasting more scientists. The crew includes college students, naval recruits looking to avoid jail time, and even a dominatrix privately hired by the California governor spearheading the operation. When they get to the gyre, they find more than just trash—something far more hazardous. The novel delivers the droll, satirical tone suggested by its subtitle. Its ragtag band of characters has unapologetically bizarre traits: Dante, who’s made a career out of being a drug-trial guinea pig; Kenny, a former football player hooked on painkillers and booze; and Tyler, a con man who mooches off women but believes his affection for Melissa, the dominatrix, is genuine—because he told her his real name. The long book is divided into three parts; the first two introduce most of the prospective crew and the oceanic excursion to the gyre. In the third, the ship reaches the island of garbage and the story takes a decidedly Lovecraftian turn. Characters are subjected to putrid odors and vile substances and attacked by mutated creatures. This section, which takes up half the novel, is filled with potent but often grotesque imagery—such as a pit trap outfitted with a bed of syringes—and is likely to make even the most steadfast readers squirm. Readers may not find it easy to care about many of the people in Swamp’s story; Captain Harvey and the governor, for example, seem to hate everyone, and other crewmembers remain unidentified (although one finally gets a name, immediately prior to his savage death). However, the savvy Melissa and selfless Dante are likeable and will likely provide readers with enough sympathy to go around.
A visually engaging, irrefutably intoxicating adventure.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2012
ISBN: 978-0615655161
Page Count: 586
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
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