Low humor that will appeal to all those guys who keep America moving slightly off-course and to the women who love them.
The master of American poop ’n’ doody–based satire returns to the Miami Crime-a-rama scene of his debut novel (Big Trouble, 1999).
The problem with fiction is that it’s really, really hard to make up stuff as stupid as the real-life lunacy Barry routinely exposes in his humor columns. But he gives it a good try. The main targets are crumb-ball floating gambling casinos and local TV news. The Extravaganza of the Seas, a highly profitable commercial venture owned by entrepreneur Bobby Kemp, steams daily into international waters to accommodate the deep-seated need of low-income Americans to get rid of the little money they have as quickly as possible. Skippered by a reformed cocaine junky, the Extravaganza features: a free buffet that nobody touches because it’s always the same “food”; hard-luck waitresses; an evil croupier who reports to the local crime boss rather than the hapless owner; and a never-made-it rock band with orders not to distract the gamblers. And the ship has a second mission. Every now and then it heaves to on the open seas to off-load lots of cash and on-load lots of drugs, a task assigned by crime boss Lou Tarant and deeply resented by Bobby Kemp, who doesn’t make a cent on the sideline. Tarant’s relentless greed sends the ship and its load of nitwits, crooks, musicians, and slot-machine–obsessed Cuban grandmas into the teeth of hurricane Hector for an especially large pharmaceutical transaction complicated by a double-crossing coke shipper, his gang of hard-puking seasick cutthroats, a giant latex conch, a couple of wisecracking escapees from a senior center, and the deep longing of the band’s lead guitar for Fay, the pretty, long-legged, single mum waitress who is more than she appears to be. Louder than the increasing winds are the hysterical TV weather-ravings of NewsPlex Nine.
Low humor that will appeal to all those guys who keep America moving slightly off-course and to the women who love them.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-399-14924-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2002
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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