A bit familiar but exciting nonetheless.
In a future dictatorship, detective Victor Vale starts questioning authority when, to infiltrate a dissident cell, he goes undercover as a writer.
Readers may be strongly reminded of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451—not so much by any Bradbury-esque poetry of language, which author Kruvant refrains from imitating, but by the similar consumer-dictatorship milieu, a capitalist police state in which artistic/creative acts are potential threats. Welcome to the Nation, a harsh, isolationist future-USA after WWIII, purged of nonwhites and micromanaged under a stern, distant female president. There’s a yawning chasm between rich and poor: ubiquitous robotics have left the now-obsolete working poor as a mob of beggars and low-caste disenfranchised homeless; those lucky enough to be born into the “Upperclass” or the government or security forces now dwell and commute in high-rise splendor in the skies, their affluent lives benumbed by violent video games, celebrity gossip, nanotech-enhanced sex, kitschy movies, and, of course, personal virtual-reality Internet connectivity. Art and literature are fiercely discouraged because “Creators” tend to rebel against the system. Narrator Victor Vale, a rising police detective, is fortunate enough to be married to a beautiful lawyer, and he expects further salary bonuses with a major assignment: go undercover as a Creator to determine whether Sylvester Huppington—head of a rare surviving book publisher and widely perceived to be a government lackey—actually leads a clandestine cell of Creators. But Vale’s vulnerabilities, such as sympathy for the beggars and a growing fascination with the Creator world, jeopardize his mission and his family. A great deal of this material is by now Dystopia 101, and the language is often rudimentary—perhaps befitting the writer/protagonist’s deliberately dumbed-down culture and upbringing. (Amusingly, while Bradbury’s “firemen” burned books, here the Technological Police Force “liquidate” them with some kind of spray-solvent.) Yet the entertaining narrative minefield pops with surprises and grim echoes of our present, keeping the pages turning toward a downbeat conclusion. In this battle of anti-intellectualism vs. the humanities, guess who has the bigger guns.
A bit familiar but exciting nonetheless.Pub Date: April 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-1942693178
Page Count: 280
Publisher: PanAm Books
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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