If this was an episode severed, so to speak, from the body of A Dark Matter, it’s easy to understand why. This is very, very...
This extremely creepy and disturbing novella is either a pendant to, or, more likely, an outtake from Straub’s most recent full-length novel A Dark Matter, published earlier this year.
This story focuses on that book’s ill-fated secondary character Keith Hayward during his adolescent years in Milwaukee. Keith’s disturbing misbehavior, spurred by his non-affectionate obsession with his neighbor’s pets, stirs his mother Maggie to hope her only child will benefit from the steadying influence of his frequently visiting Uncle Tillman. But, as we know from the opening pages, “Uncle Till” is a charismatic drifter whose unexplained nightly excursions have attracted the attention of local police. Nevertheless, Keith cherishes Till’s counsel that a boy soon to be a man needs “a special place” to store his secrets—and the boy’s “experiments” with animals take over his life. Straub sticks closely to Keith’s roiling thoughts, as he enters high school, where severe acne and an aura of menacing stoicism discourage would-be bullies. No such luck for his forlorn classmate Tomek Miller, whose gratitude for Keith’s “protection” knows no bounds. Soon Keith masters homosexual sadism (graphically, gratuitously described), forcing the weaker “Miller” to aid the researches he conducts in his secret room (the special place Uncle Till had urged Keith to create). Meanwhile, news reports about the reappearance of a serial murderer (“the Ladykiller”) enable Keith to recognize “the meshing of two separate calendars, his uncle’s and the murderer’s.” Keith confides his suspicions to Uncle Till, draws Miller deeper into his web, and, at Christmas, presents his mentor with the ultimate gift. The book is unquestionably an efficient nausea-inducer, but it contains many more shocks than surprises and is propelled by sexual imagery so pronounced that it usurps and dissipates the story’s horror content.
If this was an episode severed, so to speak, from the body of A Dark Matter, it’s easy to understand why. This is very, very close to Straub at his very, very worst.Pub Date: July 21, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-60598-102-4
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Borderland/Ivan Dee
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2010
IN THE NEWS
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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