The title is the second-best thing about this extremely uneven anthology of 20 stories written between 1985 and 1993. The best is ``The Brothers Shu,'' by Su Tong (the acclaimed Raise the Red Lantern, 1993), a preternaturally vivid vision of family unhappiness and hatred that blend together sexual torment, homicidal sibling rivalry, shape-shifting, and an aborted love suicide into a fiercely comic Dostoyevskian stew that fairly spews vitriol off the page. It's a defiant, and welcome, corrective to the collection's overall imaginative blandness. As editor and translator Goldblatt points out in his introduction, a moral and aesthetic backlash is evident in much of the literary expression that has followed the Cultural Revolution and the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. The work gathered here includes realistic tales of family and village conflict (Li Xiao's ``Grass on the Rooftop,'' Mo Yan's ``The Cure''), concentrated studies of erotic fixation (Li Rui's ``Sham Marriage,'' Ai Bei's ``Green Earth Mother''), and accounts of psychological enigma or disturbance frequently poised between reality and nightmare (Yu Hua's ``The Past and the Punishments,'' Duo Duo's ``The Day I Got to Xi'an,'' and Chen Cun's provocative ``Footsteps on the Roof''). But too many of the tales are dominated by ironic reversals and trick endings of the sort already overfamiliar to Western readers; one self-consciously raucous, blackly comic tale (Wang Xiangfu's ``Fritter Hollow Chronicles'') climaxes with a very old and well-known dirty joke. Meanwhile, though, there are other first-rate efforts in addition to Su Tong's: the amusingly masochistic fantasy of Chen Ran's kinky ``Sunshine Between the Lips''; Can Xue's Kafkaesque chronicle of a fugitive murderer's delirious last days, ``The Summons''; and Kong Jiesheng's ambitious detailing of the energies, hostilities, and consequences churned up during an archaeological dig in ``The Sleeping Lion.'' Still, on balance, there's too much dross among the gold.
Pub Date: July 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8021-1573-X
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 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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