America, Scranton seems to argue, will not, cannot, end well.
Scranton's second novel (War Porn, 2016, etc.) is less genre-bending than genre-shredding: part Kerouac-ian road trip, part end-of-days satire of Trump-era America, part fever dream, part extension and revision of Badlands and Natural-Born Killers.
At the book's center is a jaded writer named Suzie. She agrees to go on a cross-country road trip with an iconoclastic video artist—a former Wall Streeter who seems like what would happen if one of Tom Wolfe's Masters of the Universe quit finance and decided to remake himself by method-acting Wolfe's prose style—and the filmmaker's videographer/aide-de-camp. The early chapters, as the three of them clash and bristle and preen as they try to find the shape of the thing—of their quest, of themselves, of America itself—are fascinating and hyperkinetic. These pages are simultaneously high flown and earthy, like a Platonic dialogue as written by Quentin Tarantino. All art is bluster and nonsense, Suzie says to the filmmaker, but the "best stuff...is so highly refined and audacious and dense that nobody cares whether it's bullshit or not." That theory of art is this novel's aim and ideal, and for a good while Scranton succeeds at it. But midway through, the trip flies apart—the center cannot hold, or at least the vintage 1971 Plymouth Valiant they're driving cannot hold these three egos—and the book becomes, for a time, a fever dream, what Scranton calls a "dream ballet," before we rejoin Suzie, heading west again, alone this time, as she composes a retelling from Caril Ann Fugate's perspective of her murder spree with Charlie Starkweather. Not all Scranton's risks pan out—the descent of narrative into chaos is more appealing in principle than in, you know, narrative—but this novel has big ambitions, a whipsawing imaginative energy, and, at its heart, the urgency and earnestness of a jeremiad.
America, Scranton seems to argue, will not, cannot, end well.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61695-938-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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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