An experimental multimedia hymn about delving into one’s self, seeking love without labels.
A young man explores his sexuality while the Hindu gods play out their long drama throughout his life.
Getting it on isn’t easy for the most grounded of young people, let alone a gender-conflicted queer boy growing up in the wilds of Canada at a time when “You’re gay!” was hurled as the most hurtful of insults. Composed by multihyphenate pop star Shraya (God Loves Hair, 2011), this fable is punctuated by Biesinger's lurid illustrations of Hindu deities like Pavarti, Vishnu and Ganesha, who also figure prominently in the narrative. The young man who drives the story is struggling with his body, his mind, his sexuality and his self-esteem. Unfortunately, Shraya is often imprecise. One of the narrator’s friends is dubbed “The Only Other Gay.” Eventually, the young man meets “She,” a girl with whom he almost accidentally starts a relationship. Studded with early 1990s pop-culture references, the novel sets the narrator’s confusion in a time before the rigid bonds of gender identification finally started to yield (somewhat). In the background, the myths of the Hindu gods play out as a kind of chorus, as the humanized deities love and struggle and desire even as the narrator acts out his own confused journey. It’s interesting that he finds the underground world of gay culture nearly as confusing, rigid and arcane as the straight world. Upon telling friends about his relationship with “She,” they promptly recoil. This prompts a realization: “It occurred to him that the gays and the straights had more in common than he had considered before,” Shraya writes. “Just like the straights, the gays were intent on preserving and presenting a uniform, singular version of themselves; in this case, their gayness.” Sure, it’s a messy, experimental work, but props to Shraya for putting himself out there in such a daring way and speaking truth to power to readers all along the sexual spectrum.
An experimental multimedia hymn about delving into one’s self, seeking love without labels.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-55152-560-0
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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 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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
