A grimly effective entertainment, at once broad as a saber and pointed as a pike.
Kafka is brought up to date for the age of Brexit and Trump.
Never mind that in his Lectures on Literature Vladimir Nabokov protested that “he approaches a cockroach in only one respect: his coloration is brown”: Gregor Samsa, or, that is, Jim Sams, emphatically starts life as a cockroach in McEwan’s (MachinesLike Me, 2019, etc.) reimagining of The Metamorphosis. Then he awakens to discover that he has just four limbs as well as, revoltingly, that “an organ, a slab of slippery meat, lay squat and wet in his mouth.” That unwonted tongue will come in handy, but for the moment Jim has other things to attend to, for he’s not just a human, but also the prime minister of the United Kingdom. Instead of leaving the European Union, he has another item on his agenda: He’s backing a weird economic notion called reverse-flow economics, or Reversalism, whereby "the money flow [will] be reversed....At the end of a working week, an employee hands over money to the company for all the hours she has toiled. But when she goes to the shops, she is generously compensated...for every item she carries away.” It’s easy to get the American president, a fan of “fleet-footed liberation from detail,” to sign on to immiserate the taxpayers once Jim explains that he can take all the money slated for the Pentagon and make it flow up the chain into his own pocket, with the magical result that “seven hundred and sixteen billion dollars would be his.” Why bother small-scale looting when there’s so much pelf to be had? Of course, Jim twigs, the American president is on board only because he was once a cockroach himself, as were the rest of the world’s ruling and governing class, who flourish wherever people tolerate “poverty, filth, squalor” and choose to live in darkness. McEwan sweeps wide but hits home, Nabokov aside: He does a pitch-perfect Trump, pegs Angela Merkel’s bewilderment that her former allies are “inflicting these demands on your best friends,” and highlights the venality of the Leave crowd in Britain today.
A grimly effective entertainment, at once broad as a saber and pointed as a pike.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-08242-3
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
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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