One of Gardner's longest novels, most personal, most ambitious—and alas, too, the most shambling and ultimately incredible. Peter Mickelsson is a 40-ish philosopher, a famous ethicist now on the faculty of the State U. in Binghamton, N.Y. But he's sore beset at every turn: his divorcing wife is bleeding him dry financially; his son, an anti-nuke commando, is in hiding; the IRS is after Mickelsson for non-payment of years of back taxes; and the Pennsylvania-border farmhouse that he's just bought for a song (and is rehabilitating) is definitely and very scarily haunted. Still, all that is only level one of Mickelsson's woes. He has also become romantically torn between a sociologist named Jessie and a local teenage whore, Donnie; a student of his, meanwhile, is suicidal. And level three: Mickelsson, suffering the Raskolnikovian fumes of ethical relativism, goes out and kills a shadowy fat man in order to steal the man's thousands in order that Donnie will not abort Mickelsson's child. The murder is never pinned on Mickelsson. In fact, it's all but lost in the shuffle of ever-growing farfetchedness which the book slips into next: fanatic Mormon hit-squads (having to do, as well, with the ghosts in the Mickelsson house); illegal chemical dumping; various and constant crises of faith and nervous breakdowns that turn Mickelsson into a walking falling-rock-zone. Thus, the novel is simultaneously a ghost story, a chronicle of dark nights of the soul, an anthology (like Gardner's On Moral Fiction) of an astonishing array of soreheaded-nesses: there are flailing complaints against Wittgenstein, most music, Marxism, Ronald Reagan, industrial polluters, even college kids who don't smoke (). And Mickelsson is such a pathetic wreck that, despite the tremendous amount of water that's tread, there is something compelling here, mostly with his atmospheres: superb landscape pictures of the Southern Tier geography, biting fun made at faculty pretensions in the arts, and deft appearances of Mickelsson's troubles in the metaphorical guise of dogs (no doubt the dogs of Hell). Still, finally, despite its flickering power in engaging us with such a rattletrap character in extremis, this book is more unwieldy than anything else—like mountains and mountains of loose black coal, shifting and sliding but burning no fire and making no light. And Gardner's Tolstoyan intention—massive malediction and benediction at the same time—is gagged by ludicrousness, fatigue, by a plenary sloppiness that even the fiercest pain or philosophy or ghost can't scare into shape. In all: a fascinating, oddly depressing failure.
Pub Date: June 1, 1982
ISBN: 0811216799
Page Count: 612
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1982
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
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The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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