Highly inventive but excessively moralizing tales.
A collection offers satirical short stories set in a fictional land.
Bird (Catastrophically Consequential, 2012) conjures a wildly farcical cosmos that bears just enough resemblance to this one to be evocatively familiar, a place he calls Amourrica Profunda. He chronicles the peculiar but often endearing searches his protagonists conduct for love and purpose. In 1978, after graduating from Mrs. Scheissbook’s School for Fascist Piggies, Sunnie Deelite travels into the Western Desert Region, a gay man afraid to be labeled “a queen, a nelly, a pansy, a screamer.” Despite meeting friends who introduce him to libertine sexual experimentation, he only finds the “wreckage of the squandered opportunities of a lost soul.” Isabella Gloucester—raised in Miasma Falls, Puta Jork—desperately wants to be loved but finds herself trapped instead in a meaningless tryst with Flim Philanderer, who is only “in it for the sex.” Isabella finally leaves Flim and reunites with “bellicose bad boy” Bobby Chooshingoorah, and the pair forms a popular musical act. But Bobby continues to pressure her into making “ghoulish sex tapes for the red states”—he eventually leaves Isabella over her refusal—and she dedicates herself single-mindedly and ashamedly to the advancement of her career. The author also leaps into the future—to 5950—and prophesies the decline of Amourrica Profunda, ruined by “Evilangelists” as ignorant as they are unyieldingly dogmatic. Bird’s eccentric, impressionistic tales sometimes interlock but not meaningfully enough for the assemblage to constitute a coherent narrative whole—the twine that ties the eclectic stories together is the backdrop of Amourrica Profunda. The author’s writing is reminiscent of Kurt Vonnegut’s—he skillfully constructs a counterfeit world designed to deliver a hyperbolic parody of this one, both a caricature and a mirror. But Bird’s characters feel like fictional symbols and lack the fleshy depth of Vonnegut’s creations. In addition, Bird’s lampoons begin to take on the shape of didactic, knowing scolds, one of the principal dangers of satirical works. The book ends with reproductions of the author’s visual art, which is striking.
Highly inventive but excessively moralizing tales.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-692-06946-2
Page Count: 206
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: Jan. 10, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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