You know you've arrived as a celebrity filmmaker when an editor urges you to ransack your 30-year-old shoeboxes in search of a novel as fragmentary and adolescent as this one. The result is both autobiographical (the hero flunks out of Yale and makes his way to Vietnam in 1966) and prophetic (the novel was completed after Stone's teaching stint in Vietnam, but before his military tour began there in 1967). The title accurately describes the tormented impotence of the narrator, who, obsessed with the parable of Jekyll and Hyde, variously calls himself Oliver and William Stone—Oliver, his French mother's son, is the one who's read Goethe and Mill and Wordsworth and Plato; William, his American father's son, longs for the rough life as a heroic rebel. Written under the weighty influence of Joyce, most of the novel is content to dissolve people and incidents in a heady stew of stream-of-consciousness writing by turns allusive and raw. ``Why do I even bother wearing clothes?'' Oliver wonders early on. ``Nothing left to hide.'' But he goes on to reveal much, much more about his tortured soul in its journey from Yale to Vietnam and its dark dreams of 1999. Except for an extended seagoing anecdote that smacks more of Conrad than Joyce, though, non-Stone characters are largely restricted to walk-ons. (``You don't like people much, do you?'' his future wife Isobel tells him. ``Because you don't pay any attention to them when they talk to you.'') Action and monologue alike are so savage—Oliver's volcanic sexual encounters leave him almost as scarred as his companions—that it's a shock to realize how little actual combat appears in a novel that's valuable chiefly as a revelation of where Stone dug for Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, and Heaven and Earth. A must for Stone fans, though cooler heads may find it the most gratuitous literary exhumation since Norman Mailer's Transit to Narcissus. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-16798-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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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