Wearying fluff.
News flash: Many men are afraid of commitment.
David, the protagonist of the second novel by Mebus (Booty Nomad, 2004), is a young Manhattanite whose ambition is surpassed only by his shallow self-regard. He jettisoned a lucrative career in TV production to concentrate on his novel, which is inspired by his last breakup, and he bemoans the fact that his friends are doing crazy stuff like hooking up and settling down. (Clearly they ought to be living a lifestyle more like his, which involves collecting rejection letters, occupying a shoebox apartment and being barely competent at his weekend job as a wedding deejay.) David adores his tribe for being “sarcastic, overly intellectual, competitive smart-asses,” so he’s pained by the transformation of his friend Annie, who’s engaged to a decent fellow David takes to calling Rat Boy. He dubs another friend’s girlfriend Donkey Girl, and pretty quickly it’s clear that anybody who enjoys conjuring up infantile nicknames for his friends’ significant others is the guy with the problem. But though Mebus acknowledges that David could stand to grow up a little, he’s oddly confident that this egotistical, emotionally stunted fool is some kind of hero. The snark just keeps on coming, with David stubbornly cracking wise about his quirky (but less-brilliant) friends and family members. His love interest is a woman named Janey who waitresses at many of the weddings at which David deejays, and she’s interested in getting into TV production and—well, enough about Janey, what about David’s needs? The plot centers less on any would-be romance than on David’s efforts to wreck the relationship between Annie and Rat Boy with the help of Zach, who’s a stereotype twofer (trust-fund brat; promiscuous gay man). David eventually reaches the stunning conclusion that maybe, just maybe, people are allowed to make choices others may disagree with; most people could figure that out without being fed 300-plus pages of bad jokes.
Wearying fluff.Pub Date: June 21, 2006
ISBN: 1-4013-5256-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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