Bottom-dog lyricism, good dialogue, grim as a gallows.
Spiegelman made news last fall with his New York Post series attacking Jonathan Franzen, Rick Moody, and Dave Eggers, largely accusing them of trendiness and greed. How does his own debut hold up against Heartbreaking and Shifty Wordslingers Franzen and Moody?
In Bayside, Queens, at 23, Leon Koch is learning to kick in his powers with drink and drugs—and down to the end of the night he goes. His buddies are Ortiz and Rahmer, who, at 16, built pipe bombs and blew up the home of a TMR—The Master Race, or The Mentally Retarded (“They were peasants, mouth-breathers, they didn’t wipe their asses. If you looked at their DNA, it was dogshit and Tic Tacs”)—got caught, and were sent away, Ortiz for a year, Rahmer for two (because of his parents’ death in a plane crash, Ortiz has a house and half-million dollars in trust). The story wanders nonlinearly between high-school days and Leon’s young manhood. When Leon falls for lesbian Dara, an S-M freak as well, their grisly sexplay turns on Dara’s need to have sex that ends like a symphony, with rockets and cannons being set off (“Everything has to be burning”). Meanwhile, Leon tries to help out Rahmer’s overly beautiful girlfriend Cali. He starts City University, gets weirdly involved in a huge demonstration in Union Square, where Dara incites the cops as pigs. Many chapters feel like druggy slapdash paste-ups—though maybe they’re an original choppy high-art form. Most amusing scene: when Leon and his new girlfriend Carrie try to get money for coke by selling his Star Wars Hans Solo handblaster, his storm trooper rifle from Empire, and his Luke Skywalker figurine with translucent blue-plastic light saber, but keep getting cheated on each item. Ortiz, at end, suicides, vomiting out the door of a moving car, then throwing his head under the back wheel. Leon afterward becomes mentally disordered and suicidal.
Bottom-dog lyricism, good dialogue, grim as a gallows.Pub Date: June 10, 2003
ISBN: 1-4000-6056-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
