A raucous comedy about a hapless, well-endowed innocent.
The picaresque adventures of a young man oddly blessed by nature.
Murphy’s uproarious fiction debut centers on the improbable character of Manas, whom readers meet on the occasion of his birth, being very comfortable in his mother Shadow’s womb and perhaps hesitating since he senses that his father, Walter, is a thuggish, violent brute whose acquaintance he’d rather not make. Manas is Shadow’s first child since her stay in a mental hospital, and even while he’s still a baby, it becomes obvious that he has a rather distinctive physical attribute: a freakishly large male member. “[T]he nurses at the pediatrician’s offices were always present, watching in silence, each time he was brought in for a check-up.” And it’s getting bigger with every passing year. The boy’s father wastes no time in trying to profit from this bounty, but once Manas graduates high school, he runs away to join the circus, where he’s befriended by fellow freaks, including a dwarf named Baby Deadly who tries to dissuade Manas from seeing his enormous member as a curse. “I see it as an astounding gift,” she tells him, “a blessing of Nature bestowed upon you and you alone. We must segue you from a negative paradigm to a more positive one.” Manas and his coterie eventually encounter a wildly inventive cast of eccentric characters, including the ancient Nathaniel Totem Vary—whose Out-of-Context Word-of-God Bible strings together all the portions of the Bible dealing with sex, beatings and murder—and Leander Basalt, the phlegmatic traveling salesman who sells Vary’s book. The novel’s exuberant dialogue and quick pacing perfectly match the sardonic tone Murphy adopts throughout. That tone can be brutal, and the comedy is often sharp and dark, reminiscent of John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces (1980). Yet the nihilism is much closer to Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights (1997), clearly the novel’s progenitor when it comes to Manas and his miraculous endowment. Murphy brings the whole thing to a frenzied, bitterly funny climax in which, among other things, some poetic justice is meted out to loutish Walter.
A raucous comedy about a hapless, well-endowed innocent.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4327-9931-1
Page Count: 278
Publisher: Outskirts Press Inc.
Review Posted Online: March 25, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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