One of Gardner's longest novels, most personal, most ambitious—and alas, too, the most shambling and ultimately incredible. Peter Mickelsson is a 40-ish philosopher, a famous ethicist now on the faculty of the State U. in Binghamton, N.Y. But he's sore beset at every turn: his divorcing wife is bleeding him dry financially; his son, an anti-nuke commando, is in hiding; the IRS is after Mickelsson for non-payment of years of back taxes; and the Pennsylvania-border farmhouse that he's just bought for a song (and is rehabilitating) is definitely and very scarily haunted. Still, all that is only level one of Mickelsson's woes. He has also become romantically torn between a sociologist named Jessie and a local teenage whore, Donnie; a student of his, meanwhile, is suicidal. And level three: Mickelsson, suffering the Raskolnikovian fumes of ethical relativism, goes out and kills a shadowy fat man in order to steal the man's thousands in order that Donnie will not abort Mickelsson's child. The murder is never pinned on Mickelsson. In fact, it's all but lost in the shuffle of ever-growing farfetchedness which the book slips into next: fanatic Mormon hit-squads (having to do, as well, with the ghosts in the Mickelsson house); illegal chemical dumping; various and constant crises of faith and nervous breakdowns that turn Mickelsson into a walking falling-rock-zone. Thus, the novel is simultaneously a ghost story, a chronicle of dark nights of the soul, an anthology (like Gardner's On Moral Fiction) of an astonishing array of soreheaded-nesses: there are flailing complaints against Wittgenstein, most music, Marxism, Ronald Reagan, industrial polluters, even college kids who don't smoke (). And Mickelsson is such a pathetic wreck that, despite the tremendous amount of water that's tread, there is something compelling here, mostly with his atmospheres: superb landscape pictures of the Southern Tier geography, biting fun made at faculty pretensions in the arts, and deft appearances of Mickelsson's troubles in the metaphorical guise of dogs (no doubt the dogs of Hell). Still, finally, despite its flickering power in engaging us with such a rattletrap character in extremis, this book is more unwieldy than anything else—like mountains and mountains of loose black coal, shifting and sliding but burning no fire and making no light. And Gardner's Tolstoyan intention—massive malediction and benediction at the same time—is gagged by ludicrousness, fatigue, by a plenary sloppiness that even the fiercest pain or philosophy or ghost can't scare into shape. In all: a fascinating, oddly depressing failure.
Pub Date: June 1, 1982
ISBN: 0811216799
Page Count: 612
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1982
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
© Copyright 2024 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.
