A dense and confusing parody of The Great Gatsby.
Jewusiak reimagines an American classic by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
With his debut novel, Jewusiak takes a postmodern jackhammer to The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald’s most famous work. Nick Carramel is an anti-Semite. Delsey and Jillian deconstruct the metaphors of the story as they introduce them. James Landzman, a former soldier and circus acrobat who performed under the moniker “The Great Gatsby,” is even more inscrutable and laden with symbolism than Fitzgerald’s creation. These bizarro versions of Nick Carraway and company spend the book discussing modernist literature, capitalism, and the American dream while a narrator (not Carramel) denigrates the characters and speculates on which actors might be best to portray them in a film version. Some segments of the book are essentially essays on topics like the nature of myth; others are epistolary findings from the files of the characters, included by the narrator in an attempt to reach the (unreachable) truth of Landzman’s true nature. Cloaked in Lemony Snicket–esque layers of metafiction, Jewusiak, the narrator, Landzman, Carramel, Fitzgerald, and Jay Gatsby himself begin to merge into one tangled archetype of American power, deception, authorship, and authority. Jewusiak has an indisputable talent for language, invoking Fitzgerald as he spins his own rambling poetry: “The big spenders, the high rollers, the small town boosters chomping down on the big sloppy wet cigars, gathered like a great host from the provinces, the backwaters and boondocks to get plastered on the distilled spirits of exhilaration.” At over 400 pages, the book is twice the length of Gatsby, though its thesis is far less discernible. The author’s explanation of his project in the postscript includes words for would-be critics and advice for those unamused by his work (“the majority of people don’t find what I say funny either, so you have a lot of company; join the Gestapo”). Readers will decide for themselves whether the book is funny or not, but Jewusiak’s particular arguments are largely lost in the morass. In the end, the reader is confident only that the author remains angry at a lot of people, including, perhaps, the reader.
A dense and confusing parody of The Great Gatsby.Pub Date: Dec. 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9970967-0-5
Page Count: 422
Publisher: Landcaster Press
Review Posted Online: July 2, 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
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
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