If James Michener were hipper on music—and everyone from Dylan to Country Joe to Jerry and Janis shows up in Shiner’s...
Sprawling generational novel that takes the flower children of the beautiful 1960s through their paces and deposits them in the ugly world of the Trump-ian teens.
All things, including the title of novelist/music writer Shiner’s (Dark Tangos, 2011, etc.) latest, begin and end with Bob Dylan, author of lyrics that “were the secret handshake, the tap on the shoulder, the beckoning hand from the alleyway.” Jeff Cole, dutiful child of the middle class, is on a scholarship at a fancy-lad school in New York, where he meets a young Mexican, “good-looking and confident,” named Alex Montoya, his family blessed with a vastly larger bank account. “Once you get past a certain point,” Alex shrugs, “being rich is a full-time job all by itself.” Alex knows all there is to know about music and Cole, nothing—so, there in 1965, Alex takes it on himself to induct Cole by means of, yes, “Highway 61 Revisited,” or, as he calls it, “Lesson One.” Cole learns—and does he. Soon he’s playing before adoring crowds, scoring big with the ladies, hitting the road for the Golden Gate and acid sessions with the Dead and the Doors and the Airplane among “runaways, acid-heads and straights, the seekers, the believers, the gawkers, all responding to a desire that didn’t have a name yet." Over hundreds of winningly spun pages, Alex, Cole, and a host of supporting players seek that desire, finding themselves variously here at Woodstock, there on a Virginia commune, there at Berkeley and the Sunset Strip, then later seeking meaning in middle-class, tenured lives of scaled-down dreams that grow large again once the 2016 election cycle looms and the good old days look better and better. Though the book is a touch too long, it holds its energy without flagging, and every note sounds true.
If James Michener were hipper on music—and everyone from Dylan to Country Joe to Jerry and Janis shows up in Shiner’s pages—he might have written this instead of The Drifters. Reality-tinged nostalgia for those who were there—or wish they were.Pub Date: May 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-59606-900-8
Page Count: 880
Publisher: Subterranean Press
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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