NPR humorist and children's author Pinkwater (Chicago Days/Hoboken Nights, 1991, etc.) wrestles with the burning question even the Contract with America wouldn't touch: Is there weight loss after death? Dead editor Milton Cramer has been sent to a heaven for the ``metabolically different''—a paradise clearly modeled on a slightly seedy Catskills resort, complete with wall-to-wall fat guests, an exasperatingly skinny emcee, and God the Father as a borscht-belt comic. Aspiring author Milo Levi-Nathan isn't dead, but wishes he were, since dead is better than fat, even better than fat heaven. When he's not getting pep talks from his mother, Phyllis, an inspirational speaker with a difference (``Fat is the worst thing there is....Off yourself a pound at a time''), Milo's seeing Dr. Alan Plotkin, a therapist whose Psycho-Deli Associates works out of a lunchroom (``Have a knish, Milo'')—the first of a long line of counselors, quacks, and nudges who cater (heh heh) to the obese—or dashing off still another outline for a pulpy genre novel too zany to fit the straitjacketed conventions of Milton over at Harlone House. If you're wondering how Milton, who's died and gone to heaven, can be reading Milo's proposals for Mamzers from Cassiopea or The Diskountikon (which Milton rejects after losing the manuscript, only to have it turn up in an awkward new connection), you may not have the right temperament for this kitchen-sink fantasy—even though a final twist will clear up a surprising number of cosmic inconsistencies long after you'd lost hope. Funny? Yes, though the satire is too waggish to sting. What's left is some triple-distilled whimsy that Kurt Vonnegut or Douglas Adams might have produced if their characters had all been as wide as they were tall.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-41936-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 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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