After a few fun/creepy first chapters, the manipulated plot seems forced, obvious and lacking in suspense.
As the title declares, Corman’s eighth novel (A Perfect Divorce, 2004, etc.) centers on a young New Yorker’s rocky relationship with her new boyfriend, who is either a jerk or Evil Incarnate.
At 24, Ronnie is already a successful freelance journalist, but her social life is in the doldrums. While researching an article on a satanic church in the city, she interviews Richard Smith, a historian who studies satanic worship. When she asks his opinion of Satanism, he offers only a vague view that since good exists, so might evil, but Richard is strikingly handsome and Ronnie is soon swept away by his debonair charms and sexual magnetism. After her article on the satanic church comes out, Ronnie receives a dead black cat and assumes the church’s cultish leader, Randall Cummings, sent it as a threat. Meanwhile, Richard, who travels frequently for his work, sees Ronnie whenever he is in town, but her friends sense there is something off about him. Then Richard’s editor offers Ronnie a book deal to write about satanic possession. While working on the book, Ronnie begins to have the disquieting experience of enhanced powers, winning a race and drawing an elaborate sketch while blacked out. After receiving a picture of a decapitated head, Ronnie goes to confront Randall Cummings. Again, she blacks out. Randall turns up dead, and she’s a suspect. She begins to see Satan’s face, first in dreams but then on the street. After interviewing a mental patient whose satanic lover looked a lot like Richard, she comes to believe she may be possessed. A lapsed Catholic, she turns to her childhood priest in the Bronx, who holds an exorcism. Ronnie is saved/cured, but the last we see of Richard, he is talking on his cell phone and smiling enigmatically.
After a few fun/creepy first chapters, the manipulated plot seems forced, obvious and lacking in suspense.Pub Date: May 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-312-34979-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2006
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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