Maybe overwriting is the only way to handle the end of civilization. Seems to work here.
Anthropologists open Pandora’s box in South Dakota.
First-novelist Johnson, author of one of last year’s most impressive story collections (Emporium), has his wry way with the ecosystem, the breakdown of law, frontier universities, families, and other complexities in this very busy, highly original, largely entertaining, and occasionally maddening take on environmental disaster. Tenured but shaky one-book wonder Hank Hannah, professor of anthropology, fitfully labors in the spectacular disorder of his collected samples of ice cores, atmospheric layers, and other snips of the universe at the University of Southwestern South Dakota. Pining for his late stepmother, lazily lusting after Trudy, one of his two prize grad students, going not much of anywhere in his study of the early American Clovis people who may have wiped out most of the hemisphere’s megafauna twelve millennia ago, Hank more or less oversees the studies of Eggers, his other grad student. Eggers has wowed the anthropological community with his ambitious doctoral project, a year spent living with nothing but Clovis technology right in the middle of the otherwise featureless campus-on-the-steppe. Clad in fur clothing of his own tailoring, chowing down on the campus squirrels, scratching constantly from plagues of worms and insects, Eggers, the child of billionaires, has continued his studies alongside the conventional student body, and in so doing has unearthed the supreme rarity: a Clovis burial site on the fringe of one of those unspeakably garish Indian casinos. Interrupted by, among other things, an attack of Pomeranians, Trudy and Hank assist with the dig, eventually unearthing all of the troubles of the world. No kidding. A prize pig will be murdered, Hank will become gobsmacked by love for a Siberian plant paleontologist, Trudy will sink two automobiles, the Pomeranians will become sled dogs, and Hank will go to federal prison on the way to the Apocalypse. Johnson manages somehow to squeeze in some very tender observations about childhood and loss in the midst of this weird and ominous avalanche.
Maybe overwriting is the only way to handle the end of civilization. Seems to work here.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2003
ISBN: 0-670-03235-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2003
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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