Intelligent, sharply observed, often very funny—the portraits of various trendy academics are a scream—but never gets beyond...
Michener Award–winning storywriter author Piazza (Blues and Trouble, 1996) delineates a historian’s midlife crisis in his first novel, recipient of the Faulkner Society Medal.
Narrator John Delano, a professor at Hollister College in Connecticut, made his reputation with studies of the Cold War focused on imagery rather than content. A former student who’s now a hotshot New York editor has given him big bucks for a book to “approach the Cold War strictly from the surface, as you do in class.” But Delano can’t write it. His father just died, he’s had some unpleasant run-ins with fellow professors who disdain his “value-neutral” methodology, even his wife, an earnest labor organizer, is increasingly alienated by his deconstructionist attitude toward life. He’s plagued by unwanted memories: of his childhood in Atlanticville, Long Island (“classic Levittown-style suburbia”); of his father’s free-floating anger, rabid conservatism, and eventual nervous breakdown; of his sweet younger brother Chris, whom he hasn’t spoken to in eight years. Of course he can’t get out of his professional bind until he grapples with his personal problems, so the overdetermined plot sends him off to find Chris, who has fallen in with a nasty bunch of white supremacists in Iowa. Our hyper-self-aware protagonist realizes that he may want to reconcile with his brother just so he can use their meeting as fodder for a book to give his editor in place of the one he can’t write, and this knowingness is a problem with My Cold War as a whole. Everything is analyzed to death, and the insights are stale. You feel you’ve heard it all before, right down to the glib finale, in which Delano heads toward his hometown and turns off to visit the Atlanticville Historical Museum, where his past is under glass as an architect’s model of the suburban development he grew up in.
Intelligent, sharply observed, often very funny—the portraits of various trendy academics are a scream—but never gets beyond generic Baby Boomer angst.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-053340-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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