Unpersuasive political fiction.
Emery’s debut novel describes one man’s resistance toward the American government.
Unlikely revolutionary Rex Freeman grows up just like any other God-fearing, freedom-loving American: playing football, driving fast, and cheerfully challenging the status quo. Emory’s vision of this innocent America is evident in his description of Rex’s hometown, La Crescent, Minnesota: “This was a place where people worked hard to earn an honest living. They lived in decent homes, people raised their families, went to church….This is where life has its rewards. You put in a good work week and spent the weekend in the splendour in ‘God’s Country.’ Their lives were simple, of modest means and glorious.” After an unsatisfying career in corporate America, Freeman falls in with the Liberty Foundation, where he meets people victimized by the IRS. With his new friends, Freeman founds the American Law Club to keep citizens informed on ways to protect themselves against encroaching federal power. Digging ever deeper into America’s treasury of conspiracy theories, Freeman finds new ways to resist the government and spread his messages of liberty, poking at the sleeping federal giant and eventually incurring its wrath. Amid a cast of fringe revolutionaries of various stripes, Rex finds himself on the wrong side of the law and in danger of losing that which he holds dearest of all: his freedom. Emery claims several times that the novel is “based on actual experiences and events,” and the book certainly reads more like a memoir than a work of fiction, often with a tinge of self-mythologizing: “As Rex began to get a reputation in his local area he had the great pleasure of meeting another very prominent gladiator battling I.R.S. oppression.” The prose is riddled with tense shifts, unexpected British spellings, and a gross overuse of scare quotes employed with little sense of uniformity. As a narrative, the story oscillates between flat characterization and an aggressively simplistic worldview on one hand, and dry accounts of legal disputes and the tax system on the other. While Emery offers a few valid criticisms of America’s federal system, they are crowded in among so many instances of religiosity and paranoia as to render them nearly moot.
Unpersuasive political fiction.Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-0692360989
Page Count: 384
Publisher: PCF World Mission LLC
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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