The second of German author's Timm's five novels to be translated into English (The Snake Tree, 1990) gleefully targets everything we love to hate about the 1980's—heartless greed, financial speculation, yuppie food faddists, overpriced doctors, artists with inflated reputations and bank accounts to match. Timm writes with a gusto and an abundance of earthy anecdote reminiscent of Saul Bellow in his vital youth. Like Bellow, he's in love with his hometown, the patrician-proletarian port city of Hamburg, and stuffs his book with street names, legends, weather, landscapes, and history. Peter Walter, a dreamer adrift in the overheated world of high-tech high finance, is on the lam from the law and his own conscience (embodied by a prissy meddling uncle) after having been found guilty of defrauding 69 customers in complex commodity speculations. We follow him from an upscale hideout in southern Spain to Brazil and on to Easter Island, an obsession ever since childhood, when said uncle told Walter that his missing father—a Swedish sailor—was there. While running, our picaresque hero/narrator tells his tale of upward mobile woe—from birth and poverty in Hamburg's red-light district to the moment of escape from jail. Flashbacks within flashbacks and some rather heavily drawn parallels between the cannibals of Easter Island and the dog-eat-dog world of high finance clog forward motion. But there's so much fun along the way it hardly matters. Walter's escapades as a window dresser fired for posing mannequins in obscene positions; as a fast-talking and empathetic insurance salesman; his business partner's escape from East Germany across the Baltic on a homemade surfboard, and a whole string of gritty populist reminiscences about the war years make lively reading. Witty asides, mini-lectures on the nature of capitalism, the failure of socialism, the fetishistic appeal of coin and paper money, and ``chaos ideology'' round out this comic, disabused fantasia on themes from das Kapital. Marx would have cracked a grudging smile.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8112-1254-8
Page Count: 432
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1993
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
Dated sermonizing on career versus motherhood, and conflict driven by characters’ willed helplessness, sap this tale of...
Lifelong, conflicted friendship of two women is the premise of Hannah’s maudlin latest (Magic Hour, 2006, etc.), again set in Washington State.
Tallulah “Tully” Hart, father unknown, is the daughter of a hippie, Cloud, who makes only intermittent appearances in her life. Tully takes refuge with the family of her “best friend forever,” Kate Mularkey, who compares herself unfavorably with Tully, in regards to looks and charisma. In college, “TullyandKate” pledge the same sorority and major in communications. Tully has a life goal for them both: They will become network TV anchorwomen. Tully lands an internship at KCPO-TV in Seattle and finagles a producing job for Kate. Kate no longer wishes to follow Tully into broadcasting and is more drawn to fiction writing, but she hesitates to tell her overbearing friend. Meanwhile a love triangle blooms at KCPO: Hard-bitten, irresistibly handsome, former war correspondent Johnny is clearly smitten with Tully. Expecting rejection, Kate keeps her infatuation with Johnny secret. When Tully lands a reporting job with a Today-like show, her career shifts into hyperdrive. Johnny and Kate had started an affair once Tully moved to Manhattan, and when Kate gets pregnant with daughter Marah, they marry. Kate is content as a stay-at-home mom, but frets about being Johnny’s second choice and about her unrealized writing ambitions. Tully becomes Seattle’s answer to Oprah. She hires Johnny, which spells riches for him and Kate. But Kate’s buttons are fully depressed by pitched battles over slutwear and curfews with teenaged Marah, who idolizes her godmother Tully. In an improbable twist, Tully invites Kate and Marah to resolve their differences on her show, only to blindside Kate by accusing her, on live TV, of overprotecting Marah. The BFFs are sundered. Tully’s latest attempt to salvage Cloud fails: The incorrigible, now geriatric hippie absconds once more. Just as Kate develops a spine, she’s given some devastating news. Will the friends reconcile before it’s too late?
Dated sermonizing on career versus motherhood, and conflict driven by characters’ willed helplessness, sap this tale of poignancy.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-36408-3
Page Count: 496
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007
BOOK TO SCREEN
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