A frank, funny, immensely winning novel about a “sex pioneer” exploring the hinterlands of desire.
A coming-of-age story metamorphoses into a global sexual odyssey.
Kurt Larsen, the ardent young hero of this debut novel, lives in the small Norwegian town of Bodø, north of the Arctic Circle, where privacy for a teenager in the late 1990s remains in short supply. Kurt’s dreams extend far beyond the constraints of his town; he wants to “canvass the entire world for perfect bliss,” he says; “I wanted to investigate the secret thoughts of my peers. I wanted adventure, to be a sex pioneer.” His pioneering is initially limited to placing ads for anonymous hookups with strange men. Through such desperate teenage measures, he meets Jonny Larsen, with whom he’ll have an on-again, off-again relationship throughout the book, as Kurt moves on to college (where he’s the “thin-skinned, over-interpretative, horny type—a roaming satyr”). At university, the scope of his mission suddenly broadens immensely when he begins a fast-paced international flying agenda to qualify for an incredible airline giveaway that will provide him with five free tickets to anywhere in the world. On one of these stopovers, in Oslo, he sees Ragnar, a young man “on top of my list of candidates for sexual perfection,” to whom the entire narrative is addressed. Kurt clearly loses his heart to Ragnar, pleading with him that second chances at their kind of happiness don’t come along often: “Later in life there’d be work, family, and the twenty-four hour job of raising children.” The plaintive, hyperaware tone is typical of Kurt’s narration of his various erotic escapades, which are related by the author in prose that manages to be vivid without becoming either titillating or melodramatic (“Tomorrow I’d meet a dark-haired boy just under my height,” Kurt says of one of his earliest encounters. “And soon after, I’d remove his blue and yellow all-weather jacket and get down to some serious boy fun”). Kurt might at one point profess a desire to be normal and average, but in reality, his far-flung exploits are a rebellion against a young man’s hunger for experience and fear of stagnation. Karlsen conveys the poignancy of it all with extremely knowing skill, raising Kurt’s sordid, picaresque adventures to the level of a life quest.
A frank, funny, immensely winning novel about a “sex pioneer” exploring the hinterlands of desire.Pub Date: Dec. 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9969272-0-8
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Krutt & Plutt Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
