An inventive story about the ebb and flow of the artistic process, and of life itself.
Co-authors Bishop and Fuller (Realists, 2013, etc.) draw on decades of experience as playwrights and puppeteers to craft a novel about love and creativity.
Puppeteer Albert Fisher is coming up on the first anniversary of the death of his wife and collaborator, Lainie. He’s set financially and could retire, but a story begins to bloom in his mind that he can’t resist turning into a puppet production. It’s a tale of Sir Galahad’s quest for the Holy Grail, told in this novel as a story within a story. Fisher struggles to create a satisfying narrative and reflects on what his creative choices tell him about himself. He names Galahad’s wife after his daughter, Mara; he adds a young boy, separated from his parents and lost in time, and a court fool named Sammy. He can’t figure out why he has Mara disguise herself as the fool to join Galahad on his quest, and he’s challenged on the point by Jeanette Ward, a costumer he hired to dress the puppets that he’s building. As the fictional and real-life journeys continue, Fisher and Jeanette get emotionally closer. But every step forward brings more questions for Fisher as the quest in his story mirrors events in his life. The authors resist supplying easy answers for their characters, just as Fisher resists doing so for his. They intriguingly mention that Fisher is visible to the audience as he controls his puppets—an unmistakable reference to their own experience writing the novel. The novel ends up as a kind of fun house mirror of puppets controlling puppets, with little sense of who or what is controlling it all. In this respect, it feels a bit like Tom Stoppard’s famous 1966 play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. It’s both an existential drama and a comedy, in which the reader’s aha moment is the realization that an epiphany isn’t forthcoming. This may bother readers who like everything wrapped up in a neat bow, but others will find it satisfyingly realistic.
An inventive story about the ebb and flow of the artistic process, and of life itself.Pub Date: June 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9997287-0-3
Page Count: 196
Publisher: WordWorkers Press
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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