Readers in search of intelligent, whimsical nonsense could do far worse than setting sail with Pirate Captain. Aaarrr.
Having recovered from schlepping around the Galápagos in The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists (2004), Defoe’s scurvy dogs go in search of a famous whale in this slim, surreal sequel.
When the mast of his ship flattens, Pirate Captain, “the pirate who liked to show off how much he knew about wine,” recognizes that it’s time for a trade-in. Unfortunately, he makes a deal on an expensive boat with a murderer who picks off deadbeats and grinds their bones to dust for use in hourglasses. After a fruitless search for treasure to pay the debt, Pirate Captain makes the mistake of accepting an offer of help from his doppelgänger, Black Bellamy. (“There were several reasons why the Pirate Captain and Black Bellamy didn’t get along, but the main one was that Black Bellamy was the Pirate Captain’s evil nemesis, which obviously put quite a strain on the relationship.”) So the pirates—after a side trip to Vegas, where their pirate-related revue fails to draw crowds—take up a weary Ahab’s offer for a contract on Moby-Dick. Much silliness ensues. Defoe keeps things moving along and has a winning proclivity toward footnotes—where he does some of his best writing—and nonsensical asides. (Pirate Captain has his feet helpfully tattooed “left” and “right,” “a gift from his mother on his fourth birthday.”) The clever tone is somewhere between Monty Python and comic artist-writer Kyle Baker, and there are a few lascivious jokes and one instance of hot whale-on-boat action.
Readers in search of intelligent, whimsical nonsense could do far worse than setting sail with Pirate Captain. Aaarrr.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-42385-0
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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