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THE COLLECTOR COLLECTOR

The latest by the author of the witty The Thought Gang (1995), etc., is a disappointment of mind-numbing proportions. It reaches so far for comic effect that it stumbles badly and ends by seeming little more than a bland tale of frustration and confusion in matters of the heart. The gimmick is simple: Fischer tells his contemporary story in the voice of a pot—a ceramic bowl from Mesopotamia that's over 6,000 years old. The idea is that the object of collectors through the centuries now gets to turn the tables and comment on its owners, which makes this a sort of postmodern comedic comment on Bruce Chatwin's high modernist novel Utz. And that's the best one can say about the resulting strained narrative romp. The frame story concerns a young art appraiser named Rosa, a ``scrutinizer'' and diviner who can spot fakes in an instant and who can sense the complex histories of each object she fondles. This particular piece of ``pottery worth a lottery'' comes into her possession to be appraised for a ``lugal'' (the pot's term for wealthy collectors) of maniacal disposition. Meanwhile, a nympho-kleptomaniac connives her way into Rosa's life, performing acts of thievery (and sex) that are increasingly outrageous. But Rosa's mind is elsewhere: She falls under the sway of a columnist to the lovelorn whose advice lost Rosa her last boyfriend. Interspersed throughout this main story are the many tales imparted by the pot, itself a cracked narrator of bizarre fables involving its previous owners: the man who couldn't kill his wife; the spurned lover who couldn't succeed at suicide; the village called ``Arsehole''; the ship that sailed for Cathay but never left Venice; and Odile, the collector of insane poets. There's also a running joke about frozen iguanas. For all of its manic inventiveness—the wordplay, the rhymes, the new vocabulary—Fischer's goofy novel is a victim of its own cleverness. (Author tour)

Pub Date: May 1, 1997

ISBN: 0-8050-5118-X

Page Count: 208

Publisher: Henry Holt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1997

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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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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

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.

"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

Pub Date: June 15, 1951

ISBN: 0316769177

Page Count: -

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951

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