Scabrous and cleverly evocative of the confusion of emergent adulthood, Cross’s blistering prose lifts a familiar storyline...
A savvy, comic/gothic debut exploring the angry mania of teenage alienation.
With its characteristically sardonic title, Cross’s impressive, dark first fiction (a Betty Trask award-winner) is the extreme opposite of a sunny romance, more like a gathering thunderstorm, set in 1984 in a Yorkshire village where the stench of blood and guts hangs in the atmosphere—both the actual by-product of the local tannery and the symbolic fear of a serial murderer at large. Narrator Mona, 15, is a roiling stew of hormones and teenage disgust: “Sex, alcohol and crime were my only desires.” Her contempt begins at home, which she shares with her promiscuous father (a pub landlord), stepmother and obese stepbrother PorkChop. Mona’s mother left home three years earlier, then succumbed to cancer. Mona’s escape is to groom a pony belonging to the posh Fakenhams, whose wealth fails to insulate them from similar dysfunction. The parents are separating after Mr. Fakenham’s latest infidelity, the eldest daughter Sadie is dead of anorexia and younger child Tamsin is back home after trouble at boarding school. Despite the class divide, Tamsin and Mona are natural allies, united in irony, anorexic aspiration, booze and adolescent outrage. With both her parents absent, Tamsin invites Mona to stay and a period of vandalism and physical excess begins, tempered with sexual experimentation. Despite Mona’s commitment to Tamsin, she is also drawn into involvement with sleazy local photographer Phil, who takes pictures of her topless and reveals photos of another girl, Julie Flowerdew, who might be the latest murder victim. Themes of disappearance and death intensify, as the teenagers’ fantasies bleed into the real world and they manipulate Phil for cash while implicating him in the murder investigation. Although Tamsin’s intensity becomes suffocating, Mona fails to break away. The spiral tightens, and the story ends with an unexpected, horrific and collusive act of violence.
Scabrous and cleverly evocative of the confusion of emergent adulthood, Cross’s blistering prose lifts a familiar storyline to another level.Pub Date: July 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7475-7588-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2005
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
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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