Too brief by far, but with enough sparks to give an idea of the author’s irreverent revelations. Overall, a fresh voice, and...
Shades of the absurd, Orthodox Jewish style, in a nutty little debut collection of 14 stories.
An 18-year-old Lubavitcher yeshiva student wakes up one morning in the form of a “very large goy” and terrorizes the community of bickering rabbis in “The Metamorphosis.” In “God Is a Big Happy Chicken,” newly dead Yankel Morgenstern ascends to heaven to discover that God is—surprise!—Chicken himself, “who gets his feed filled in the morning, and his droppings cleaned in the afternoon and that’s all He really wants to know.” And though Yankel is allowed to return to tell what’s what to his devoted family, still praying to a non-fowl deity, he can’t bring himself to disabuse them of their cherished ideals. In “Bobo the Self-Hating Chimp,” a small male chimpanzee in the Bronx Zoo achieves “total conscious self-awareness” one day when he recognizes that he feels shame—thanks to a “bright red erection”—and has a kind of breakdown that leads him to reject his previous monkey existence as meaningless and embrace suicide. In his theatrically deadpan moments, humor writer Auslander revisits Beckett, most notably, while a fear-and-loathing urban sensibility à la Woody Allen also springs to mind, along with Kafka, in these grim, seemingly silly pieces that possess a direct comic hit. “Holocaust Tips for Kids” is a marvelously twisted catalogue of grisly historical facts mixed with juvenile naïveté and fear: “Anne Frank hid in her attic for over two years. / Maybe I should pack more food.” Many of the stories skewer in some fashion what may be more contentious and solipsistic aspects of Judaism. In the last tale, for example, “It Ain’t Easy Bein’ Supremey,” a balding junior accountant, Epstein, creates two slavish golem from the Kabbalah for Dummies only to watch them kill each other over finer points of law.
Too brief by far, but with enough sparks to give an idea of the author’s irreverent revelations. Overall, a fresh voice, and wonderfully fearless.Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-6456-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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
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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