An interesting successor to Kunzru’s now-famous first novel.
Confusion and carnage on the information superhighway claim reputations, lives, and corporations.
The Anglo-Indian author’s harshly satiric second outing (after The Impressionist, 2002) opens with a charmingly funny account of young computer programmer Arjun Mehta’s hopeful departure from his smothering Indian parents and arrival in California, where the promised job that lured him there does not materialize. Arjun frets and daydreams, his culture shock soothed by romantic imaginings about “India’s sweetheart,” film star Leela Zahir—until he’s rescued by employment with Virugenix, a virus-fighting software company based in Washington State. After a brief period of security, Arjun is terminated, and, unwilling to return home in disgrace, becomes inconsolable. Then a malignant virus bearing the image of Leela Zahir attacks the world’s computers—and we know who’s created it. Meanwhile (in a comparatively bland subplot), British paper millionaire advertising mogul Guy Swift—whose New Age-y company declares itself “not so much an agency as an experiment in life-work balance”—sees his dream of “promoting Europe” scuttled, and loses his gorgeous coke-addicted girlfriend Gabrielle, who provides p.r. for a film Leela is shooting in Scotland, and beds Leela’s serial co-star, film hunk Rajiv Rana. Transmission (whose witty title is explained in the closing pages) wanders around its subject almost as much as Arjun does up and down the West Coast, fleeing toward Canada, then Mexico, before disappearing into the mists of computer legend, becoming a “hero” to hackers everywhere. Kunzru lays on the technical detail thickly, and computer geeks will perhaps best appreciate the sinuous meanderings and misdirections here. But its antic vision of an all-too-easily imperiled global village has enough charm and bite to engage us all.
An interesting successor to Kunzru’s now-famous first novel.Pub Date: June 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-525-94760-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2004
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
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
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