Kudos to Barker for pulling that off. The novel itself is another story.
The British author (Behindlings, 2002, etc.) riffs amusingly on a recent historical incident.
On September 5, 2003, American “illusionist” (i.e., magician) David Blaine spent 44 days in a clear plastic (Perspex) box suspended over the Thames River near London’s Tower Bridge. Blaine emerged from his self-imposed ordeal (during which he ingested nothing but water) 50 pounds lighter, and possessed of a paradoxical celebrity. Here, Barker considers possible motives for his stunt (homage to Holocaust victims, protest against mass consumerism), while sketching the varied reactions of the “community” of spectators that forms nearby, and comments—often in quite vitriolic terms—on the American intruder’s action (or, more properly, inaction). No real conclusions are drawn by Barker’s diffident narrator, Adair MacKenny, a minor clerk at the London Assembly Building. But we hear rather more from his Ghanaian flatmate Solomon (who has made a career out of absorbing and debating British pop culture), Solomon’s sweetheart Jalisa (who notes “hunger-artist” Blaine’s intellectual debt to filmmaker Werner Herzog as well as Kafka) and Adair’s putative girlfriend Aphra, whose obsession with collecting shoes seems scarcely less bizarre than the overhead spectacle observers have dubbed “Above the Below.” In this sixth outing, Barker eschews plot, offering instead excited commentary vitiated by deliberate redundancy, hectoring addresses to the reader, aggressive overpunctuation and lots of blank space on the page. Add to this the author’s refusal to develop any of her characters, and there really isn’t much more to this than one character’s banal summary declaration that Blaine is “like a mirror in which people can see the very best and worst of themselves. That’s the simple genius of what he’s doing.” Perhaps Clear is a magic act—because this essentially empty novel was long-listed for the 2004 Booker Prize.
Kudos to Barker for pulling that off. The novel itself is another story.Pub Date: June 17, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-079757-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2005
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
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
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