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
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
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
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