The creepy archaisms and deliberately fruity neo-Victorian style used to devastating effect in the best of these vivid...
A solid third collection (following Houses Without Doors, 1990, and Wild Animals, 1984) of the veteran horror writer's insidious and disturbing short fiction, featuring two already famous stories.
“The Ghost Village,` winner of a World Fantasy Award, is a Vietnam combat tale (with interesting echoes of Straub's novel Koko); a partial homage to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in its revelations of what happens to a soldier `forced to confront extreme experience directly`—and of the shapes assumed by an embattled village's collective guilt. The highly praised `Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff` offers a similar nod to Melville's Beckett-like `Bartleby the Scrivener.` The story concerns a highborn attorney who, outraged by his wife's infidelity, hires the eponymous private `consultant` team to punish the adulteress—and, in a series of grimly funny, increasingly ghastly episodes, learns the full extent of their enigmatic promise that `our work brings about permanent changes which can never be undone.` It's the best thing Straub has yet written. Of the five other stories, one is a fairly conventional (though skillfully constructed) tale of a secretive `travel writer's` real (criminal) mission in Paris (`Isn't It Romantic?`); two (`Ashputtle` and `Hunger, an Introduction`) are stylized monologues that portray the makings of two very different homicidal maniacs; and `Porkpie Hat` is an overly convoluted tale about a Mississippi backwater murder and haunting set also in the world of jazz and jazzmen Straub obviously loves. And the superb `Bunny is Good Bread` traces with unnerving precision (and in horrific detail) the stages through which an emotionally and sexually abused boy grows into a righteous psychopathic killer; it's one of the most unnerving of Straub's several dramatizations of the ways that children perceive adults as monsters threatening to destroy them.
The creepy archaisms and deliberately fruity neo-Victorian style used to devastating effect in the best of these vivid stories suggest that Straub might think of undertaking a full-dress historical horror novel, something along the lines of Caleb Carr's The Alienist. You have to believe he has the chops for it.Pub Date: July 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50393-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2000
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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