An infrequently funny sequel to 1986's wildly successful (via movie) Forrest Gump. This time out, the idiot-savant/moral paragon bumbles through the history of the 1980s. Most of this contemporary Candide's pals are also back from the previous novel: The love of Gump's life, Jenny, has passed into a benevolent ghostdom; legless Lieutenant Dan has fallen on hard times; and the father of Vietnam buddy Bubba has seen Gump's shrimping operation crumble. New to the cast is Forrest's genius son, little Forrest, a sometimes sullen adolescent who drifts into the narrative from time to time to hatch brilliant moneymaking schemes. Gump briefly returns to football, saving the New Orleans Saints from a dead-end season, devises the formula for New Coke, then winds up on a hog farm in West Virginia, where little Forrest shows up with a plan for using pig feces to generate electric power. Gump screws this up, however, and is chased by an angry mob that he eludes by hopping a train, where he again meets up with Lieutenant Dan. The reunited pair take up a homeless life in Washington, until Oliver North recruits Gump to join the Iran-contra fiasco. After Gump takes the fall for North, a dissolute Wall Streeter (Ivan Boesky-like) appears and makes Gump the patsy in an insider-trading scam. From there, it's off to Berlin, where Gump starts the riot that brings down the Wall before he ends up in the middle of the Gulf War, capturing Saddam Hussein. Then it's back to Louisiana, where he and little Forrest revolutionize the oyster business. Finally, Gump crosses paths with Bill Clinton, busy peddling Arkansas real estate. Stupid is as stupid does. Guess which Oscar-winning actor Gump runs into at Elaine's? (Film rights to Paramount; author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-671-52170-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1995
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
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