Dystopian, wonkish fun for the Maddow set.
Could a Sarah Palin presidency spark a faith-based civil war in America? You betcha, according to Rich’s debut novel.
The book is narrated by Greg, who, in 2029, is recalling the country’s grim fate after John McCain bested Barack Obama in the 2008 election. When McCain dies shortly after taking office, Palin becomes the willing puppet of Christian dominionists—religious zealots who insist on making the United States a Christian nation, home-schooling their children into soldiers for Christ. Dominionism is real, as Greg’s college friend Sanjay explains; certain that Palin’s God-themed rhetoric will undo individual rights, Sanjay starts a nonprofit called Theocracy Watch and ultimately hires Greg, a lawyer, to help fight right-wing efforts. Rich is a lawyer himself, and his book is as much a law-driven polemic as it is a work of fiction, but its tone is fairly cool considering. Though Rich describes President Sarah Palin as badly out of her depth, he takes her ascension to power seriously; it opens the door for her successor, Steve Jordan, to implement as the law of the land a 50-article “Blessing” that bans homosexuality, abortion and labor unions, restricts nonevangelical worship and seats only Christian federal judges. Michael Bloomberg (as New York’s governor) leads a blue-state resistance, but it’s all for naught: By 2018, Federal bombs are dropping on the Castro, and dissidents are herded into re-education camps. If Rich’s determination to equate evangelical political power with the Nazis seems overstated, he shrewdly shows how a few legal measures, a bad recession and a terrorist attack can unravel the liberties many take for granted. In that regard, it’s an inheritor to Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel, It Can’t Happen Here, which imagined America under totalitarianism, though Palin is as likely to claim federal power now as Huey Long was then.
Dystopian, wonkish fun for the Maddow set.Pub Date: July 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-393-24011-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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
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