As Burroughs's last book of prose (The Cat Inside, 1992) demonstrated, his publishers will print anything by the octogenarian hipster, even a silly cat book. This latest purports to be a novel, but it's really more random scribbling by the Nike sneaker shill, whose media image far exceeds his achievement as a writer. These ragged, disjointed paragraphs chronicle a year or so of Burroughs's dream life, which is much less lurid than one would expect. Sure, there are drugs (hash, heroin, morphine, laudanum, etc.) and cameos by all his friends living and dead (Brion Gysin, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Paul Bowles, Ian Somerville, etc.). But the sex is nondescript ("sex with James" or "made it with Ian"); the places all familiar to Beat groupies (Tangier, Paris, London, and Lawrence, Kans.); and the familial stuff, which has passed into legend, is just alluded to (shot wife playing Wm. Tell; son dead at an early age). Burroughs likes to show his knowledge of guns (".45 Ruger APC and Long Colt Cylinder") and frequently expresses his preference for cats over dogs and people. Some vintage moments include a dream of a cockroach stuck in his ear and of a man scooping his brains from his skull to eat. Burroughs really comes alive, though, when he leaves his dreamscapes to explicate. A dream of a "shitting woman" leads to a long and sordid anecdote about a "queen" friend married to a wealthy woman with a severe colon problem. Burroughs's political commentary amounts to some dated rants about Anita Bryant, Ronald Reagan, and the CIA. His claim to total honesty and authenticity leads him to debunk Ted Morgan's view of him as a "literary outlaw." His waking thoughts dwell sentimentally on cats, with occasional riffs that remind one of the old Burroughs. Die-hard fans will no doubt scoop this up, others need not go beyond Naked Lunch, preferably in David Cronenberg's movie version.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-670-81350-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
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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