With lyrical precision and solid, unpredictable storytelling, McManus (Ghost Waves, 1988, etc.)—a poet and novelist who displays here the skills of both genres—creates a contemporary picaresque that establishes human finitude as the noblest obsession. Penny Culligan, for most of the narrative a 29-year-old Irish grad student in literature from Chicago, has plenty of good reasons to mull over her mortality: A diabetic, she knows her days are numbered, and she's not at all happy about it. She carries other baggage as well. When she was 22, the love of her life was half-eaten, alive, by a grizzly bear in Alaska. He survived, but in such horrifying shape that he begged Penny to do him in, which, with a syringeful of insulin, she did. Seven sexless years later, her dissertation on Beckett's Trilogy languishing, aware that she'll be lucky to live past 30, Penny sets out on a bike trip that will take her back to Alaska. What follows is essentially an extended internal monologue in which Penny considers her life's five pillars: sex, love, diabetes, Samuel Beckett, and death. Author McManus, meanwhile, himself a diabetic, brings his poet's talent for invigoratingly curt description to bear on what in reality is a numbing routine dictated by disease: check the blood sugar, gauge the dosage, shoot up. And yet each time Penny breaks out her injection equipment, the trauma is new. The two-wheel grind is broken when Penny, after a minor accident, accepts a ride from Ndele Rimes, a black guy who may or may not be a pro basketball player, and who's driving a Mercedes convertible that may or may not be stolen. The crucial lesson is that every journey into the self must be begun and finished alone, but that company along the way helps. It's a strong storyteller who can bring so elliptically to a close such an emotionally affecting tale—which is exactly what the sensitive and talented McManus manages to do.
Pub Date: Feb. 14, 1996
ISBN: 0-06-017374-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1995
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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