The author of numerous children's and YA novels, Gantos turns for the first time to some distinctly adult material in this straightforward jailhouse narrative, yet another novel in which an Elvis impersonator figures prominently. Ray Jakes is a medium-level drug dealer whose luck runs out when his involvement in a drug-smuggling scheme leads to his conviction and a possible six-year sentence. A college dropout, with the vague ambition to become a forest ranger, Jakes finds himself stuck in the limbo of a transfer jail on Manhattan's West Street. His disgusted girlfriend doesn't visit, he has no real friends, and he must also endure the indignities of jailhouse life, from the constant fear of rape to the maddening pervasiveness of vermin. He eventually lands a cushy job on the hospital detail, where he also hooks up with Seth Zimmer, an Elvis impersonator who's in for embezzlement, fraud, tax evasion, and other crimes committed in the name of the King. "A symbol of hope for losers," the pseudo-Elvis mesmerizes a prison talent show, inspiring the warden to send him on the jailhouse circuit, with Jakes as his manager. Both cons figure this is a way to a short term, but only Elvis manages to cut a deal. Jakes finds his way out by blackmailing the warden with some purloined X-rays proving excessive force by guards, but it means betraying his only friend, a kind prison doctor. Further betrayals mar life outside, when Jakes loses his substantial pre-jail stash in a nasty con executed by his supposed buddy Zimmer. Numerous flashbacks provide a socio-psychological profile of Jakes's rootless youth and of his need to be a follower, a weakness that invariably lands him in trouble. And also makes him thoroughly unlikable. The jailhouse insight in this unsurprising, rather superficial work comes nowhere near the belly of the beast.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1996
ISBN: 1-882593-15-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bridge Works
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1996
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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