A complex, absorbing, and occasionally moving read.
A thoroughly unsentimental novel told from 10 different perspectives, all having at their center Beatrice (who renames herself “Christmas”), a 13-year-old dying of cancer.
Parker sets himself a difficult task here—telling the story of a young girl with cancer in a way that doesn’t try to wring a cheap emotional response from readers. What makes this easier is the character of Christmas herself, who is at times wise, opinionated, angry, recalcitrant, sarcastic, and mean. The narrative is told in fragments by 10 people who have come in contact with Christmas, often in extraordinarily brief encounters. The facts are simple: Christmas Danzig has recently been put in the care of her Aunt Nikki because her father, Otto, has died, and her “wide-eyed, dipshit, junkie mother” is unable to care for her. Far from being grateful, Christmas runs away and winds up encountering a variety of characters, some good-hearted and others merely eccentric. Parker is a master of tonal complexity, for these encounters can range from the hilarious to the poignant to the enigmatic, often within the same story. One of Christmas’ most moving encounters doesn’t even involve physically meeting another character but rather corresponding with Dorothy, a woman who’s started the Dear Dorothy blog about The Wizard of Oz. When Christmas posts that she wants to meet the woman behind the blog, a correspondence develops that opens Dorothy up emotionally—until she discovers that her boyfriend has been faking some of Christmas’ letters. In another story a woman named Evie feverishly prepares for GlitterFest, a subculture that gives meaning to her life, and only at the very end of the story does Christmas appear and express a desire to see the show. The final story, from the perspective of Aunt Nikki and written after Christmas’ death, provides a more thorough overview of Christmas’ life and of her effect, both good and bad, on others.
A complex, absorbing, and occasionally moving read.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-945814-46-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dzanc
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
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
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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