An eccentric satire that stands in contrast to Mishima’s more formal works and that makes for quick and entertaining reading.
Offbeat, sardonic yarn about self-commodification and its discontents.
Mishima is best known for brooding, elegant novels such as The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea (1963) and the stories collected in books like Death in Midsummer (1953) as well as his spectacular suicide by seppuku after leading a failed coup attempt in 1970. This slender novel, published two years before his death, sounds his disdain for the capitalism that had replaced traditional Japanese values. Hanio, a young man, awakens in a white room where a nurse and paramedic await him. “It dawned on Hanio that his attempt at suicide had failed,” writes Mishima, matter-of-factly. Since clearly Hanio can’t pull it off by himself, he takes out an ad reading, “Life for Sale. Use me as you wish.” The first response is from an old man who tells him his young wife is sleeping with a gangster, and Hanio dutifully marches off to seduce her with an eye to getting himself and the young woman gunned down by her affronted lover. It doesn’t quite work out. Nor does Hanio succumb to the ministrations of a comely young widow whose son hires him to be her boyfriend. There’s just one hitch: She’s a “very unusual sort of person,” as the kid says, in fact a vampire. And so on. Things are never as simple as they seem, and all of his contacts are connected in a strange conspiracy that hinges on the Asia Confidential Service, a spy network that may or may not exist. The one person who seems to get it is a disaffected young woman who’s fond of LSD and literature and who tells him, “I know what your problem is. You’re tired of trying to die.” She’s right, but now that others are out to do him in, Hanio no longer has to go to the trouble of finding a way to do it—a nice if bleak twist.
An eccentric satire that stands in contrast to Mishima’s more formal works and that makes for quick and entertaining reading.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-56514-7
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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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