Dispensing with plot, Goebel wings it, credibility take the hindmost. It doesn’t work.
First novel by the 21-year-old Goebel, former lead singer of the punk band The Mullets: a tale of five oddballs who form a rock band in small-town Kentucky:
Watch them make heads turn: the wild-eyed young black man (Luster); the smoking hot blonde in the wheelchair (Aurora); the feisty octogenarian in the cowboy boots (Opal); the hellraising third-grader Opal baby-sits (Ember); and an effeminate Iraqi (Ray). These are the eponymous Anomalies, who’ve come together under Luster’s direction to play “power-pop new wave heavy metal punk rock.” The players are introduced awkwardly, by multiple narrators in writing that stumbles from social realism to cartoonish whimsy. Thus protagonist Luster is both an industrious commissary runner at a dog-racing track and a lonely Mr. Clean in a family of drug-dealers (12 brothers, all called Jerome). What becomes clear soon enough is that this messy debut is the latest report from the front in America’s never-ending cultural clash between the Hip and the Square, between free spirits and those whom Luster contemptuously dismisses as “humanoids.” Unfortunately, Goebel’s formulation is tired (the humanoids “are all hooked up to the same giant mechanical brain”) and the battle lines not sharply drawn. We are left with a buzz of angry voices. Aurora is so angry with the predatory guys who keep hitting on her that she takes refuge in a wheelchair, though there is nothing wrong with her; Opal is angry with her nieces and her therapist; Luster and Ember are angry with just about everybody. Four angry band members, all fired up with nowhere to go. The exception is Ray, a gentle soul who has drifted over from Vonnegut country. His quixotic mission is to find and apologize to the GI he wounded in the Gulf War. He succeeds, but the unintended consequence is that the band’s one and only gig descends into bloody mayhem.
Dispensing with plot, Goebel wings it, credibility take the hindmost. It doesn’t work.Pub Date: April 16, 2003
ISBN: 1-931561-29-X
Page Count: 208
Publisher: MacAdam/Cage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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
Dated sermonizing on career versus motherhood, and conflict driven by characters’ willed helplessness, sap this tale of...
Lifelong, conflicted friendship of two women is the premise of Hannah’s maudlin latest (Magic Hour, 2006, etc.), again set in Washington State.
Tallulah “Tully” Hart, father unknown, is the daughter of a hippie, Cloud, who makes only intermittent appearances in her life. Tully takes refuge with the family of her “best friend forever,” Kate Mularkey, who compares herself unfavorably with Tully, in regards to looks and charisma. In college, “TullyandKate” pledge the same sorority and major in communications. Tully has a life goal for them both: They will become network TV anchorwomen. Tully lands an internship at KCPO-TV in Seattle and finagles a producing job for Kate. Kate no longer wishes to follow Tully into broadcasting and is more drawn to fiction writing, but she hesitates to tell her overbearing friend. Meanwhile a love triangle blooms at KCPO: Hard-bitten, irresistibly handsome, former war correspondent Johnny is clearly smitten with Tully. Expecting rejection, Kate keeps her infatuation with Johnny secret. When Tully lands a reporting job with a Today-like show, her career shifts into hyperdrive. Johnny and Kate had started an affair once Tully moved to Manhattan, and when Kate gets pregnant with daughter Marah, they marry. Kate is content as a stay-at-home mom, but frets about being Johnny’s second choice and about her unrealized writing ambitions. Tully becomes Seattle’s answer to Oprah. She hires Johnny, which spells riches for him and Kate. But Kate’s buttons are fully depressed by pitched battles over slutwear and curfews with teenaged Marah, who idolizes her godmother Tully. In an improbable twist, Tully invites Kate and Marah to resolve their differences on her show, only to blindside Kate by accusing her, on live TV, of overprotecting Marah. The BFFs are sundered. Tully’s latest attempt to salvage Cloud fails: The incorrigible, now geriatric hippie absconds once more. Just as Kate develops a spine, she’s given some devastating news. Will the friends reconcile before it’s too late?
Dated sermonizing on career versus motherhood, and conflict driven by characters’ willed helplessness, sap this tale of poignancy.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-36408-3
Page Count: 496
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007
BOOK TO SCREEN
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