A lot of flash, and not much more.
Hall (Haweswater, 2003) earned a Booker nod with this picaresque tale of a tattoo artist.
The story begins in the early days of the 20th century, with its hero, young Cyril Parks, trying not to look into a bowl full of mucus coughed up by one of the many consumptive guests at his mother’s seaside hotel. But look he does, and so must the reader, who will be treated to visions of various watery secretions—blood, sweat and much, much worse—as the story progresses. While his author indulges in an almost childlike fascination with ordure, Cyril himself develops a more pleasant—if not quite reputable—liquid passion of his own: He embarks upon a career as a tattoo artist. Ink becomes his medium, flesh becomes his canvas and his vocation takes him from the English resort town of Morecambe all the way to Coney Island. It should go without saying that Cyril meets a variety of colorful characters, including, but not limited to, circus folk. One might suppose that, given all the oddity and jolly filth here, Hall wants to expose the light that shines in shady places, to celebrate the beauty of the weird. Sadly, she doesn’t manage anything quite so interesting. Like the tattoo itself, this novel doesn’t penetrate very deeply. Hall has earned comparisons to Angela Carter, but the similarities between the two authors are only superficial. Despite all the mess, there’s no real menace here, no whiff of the uncanny, no arcane secrets obliquely revealed. There is a torrent of whimsy and caressingly lyrical description, but the effect of all this poetry is not enchantment; it’s weariness. The characters are flat, the story travels far without ever really going anywhere and the occasional attempts to philosophize about tattoos are generally fatuous.
A lot of flash, and not much more.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-081724-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2005
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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