Has the world gone mad? Has Josh? Or has Goldstein?
It’s helpful that the title page characterizes this debut volume by NPR and magazine writer Goldstein as “(A Novel),” for otherwise the reader might be even more perplexed by the assortment of bite-sized vignettes, observations and non-sequiturs that challenges categorization.
Even the agile mind of the late Lenny Bruce (who receives the briefest of name checks here) would have difficulty determining what to make of this. The elliptical narrative was first published in 2001 in Canada, where the Brooklyn-born author lives. The anti-plot features a nondescript protagonist named Josh who works at a fast-food dive called Burger Zoo. Josh’s father is Chick. Josh’s mother is Frieda. Frieda is sick. Or dying. Or dead. Josh’s narrative makes such leaps of chronology and consciousness that just when the reader has determined that Frieda has died, she returns to life. Josh has a best friend named Kaliotzakis. Josh also has a series of girlfriends, though except for the changes of names as they come and go from these pages, it’s difficult to distinguish them. Josh has a rabbi with messianic aspirations who sells something called Kosher-style Love Lotion. The Love Lotion appears to be more repugnant than seductive. Sex is only one of the bodily functions that obsesses Josh. Maybe Josh has no inner life or maybe all he has is an inner life. Maybe all of this meandering is a meditation on consciousness, or connectedness, or time as it operates within the Mobius strip of the mind. Maybe it’s designed to subvert every expectation of narrative progression and character development, as if those who perceive life and art in such linear fashion haven’t recognized that the illusion of linearity is itself a trick of the mind. On occasion, Josh disappears, replaced by the first-person narration of “I.” Whether or not Josh is “I” doesn’t seem to mean more than anything else within this random, seemingly arbitrary assemblage of paragraphs.
Has the world gone mad? Has Josh? Or has Goldstein?Pub Date: March 31, 2006
ISBN: 1-58243-347-X
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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