It’s Catch-22 by way of The Matrix.
Bubblegum pop-future comedy in which corporations go to war like feudal fiefdoms.
In a move guaranteed to provide the impetus for many a lawsuit, all Barry’s characters have forgone use of their surnames in the interest of renaming themselves after their place of work—so we have Jennifer Government, John Nike, Hack Nike, Buy Mitsui, and Billy NRA. Jennifer is a former top advertising exec with a barcode tattoo on her face who is now a loose-cannon federal agent and single mother, as deadly with a pistol as she once was with ad copy. The world situation: corporations are even more rapacious than today, and they fight one another along battle lines drawn up by two big consumer reward programs: US Alliance and Team Advantage. Governments themselves are a thing of the past, with the exception of the US one, which is now privatized and running other parts of the globe, including Australia, where the book is set. Coldhearted marketing whiz John Nike (one of two characters so named) has decided that Nike’s new sneakers would fly off the shelves all the faster if on the day they were delivered to Niketowns, several teenage customers got shot for them. It’s a manufactured street cred thing. Shooters are hired—many from the now-privatized and militia-like NRA—and, despite Jennifer’s best efforts, 14 teen shoppers get killed. The remainder of the story describes a rapidly escalating battle for supremacy between Jennifer’s government agents and the forces of Nike, who believe themselves to be invulnerable and don’t hesitate to use deadly force. At the same time, things are heating up between US Alliance and Team Advantage, with Burger Kings getting bombed, snipers going after rival chain stores, and riots erupting in the streets. Barry (Syrup, 1999) has a quick wit and a light touch, which helps the reader skate over some of the occasional patches of too-obvious satire and should translate easily (though more litigiously) to film.
It’s Catch-22 by way of The Matrix.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-50759-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2002
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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