McCabe, as skilled and significant a novelist as Ireland has produced in decades, follows up 1993's acclaimed The Butcher Boy- -his third novel and American debut—with yet another savagely acerbic riff on the decay of modern life and the modern Irish. Malachy Dudgeon and Raphael Bell are as distant in age and attitude as they are morally removed from their prophet and angel namesakes. Malachy, the younger, coasts on his innocent wits while struggling with the trauma of his parents' loveless marriage that drove his father to suicide. Raphael, older by a generation, can't escape the memory of his own father's murder at the hands of Ireland's vicious Black and Tans. With no gentle irony, McCabe gives both men jobs in the same Catholic boys' school, St. Anthony's, where Raphael establishes a legendary reputation for himself as a principal who prizes discipline over progressive pedagogy, and where inexperienced teacher Malachy soon discovers that his hipster personality is no match for his horribly misbehaved students. Beaten like animals by the likes of Raphael, the boys of St. Anthony's have learned to attack at any sign of weakness. It isn't long before tragedy strikes (a student drowns) and Malachy gets sacked. At the same time, Raphael suffers his own trials: Hippie educational reformers are clamoring for his hide, and he's lost the support of the Catholic clergy. When Malachy's wife cheats on him with a rock guitarist, he lights out for London, where he swiftly degenerates into a dope fiend and derelict. Raphael remains in Dublin, but, following the death of his wife, he barricades himself in his house and starts The Dead School, delivering alcoholic lectures to phantom students while his deceased cat rots on the windowsill. At the close, McCabe recollides his characters in a brief and hilariously awkward showdown—and then permits things to become even worse. The big challenge for an Irish writer is to move in a new direction from the magisterial accomplishment of Joyce, Yeats, and Beckett, and to do it within the remarkable scope of Irish English. McCabe is the man.
Pub Date: April 26, 1995
ISBN: 0-385-31420-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
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
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