There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. 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. These are darkly hilarious tales about the encounter with the black void: a highly crafted intelligent book for intelligent, verbally attuned readers for whom the baroque is but a heightened way of approaching reality.įour 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. Elkin makes the unspeakable funny (two old people consciously preparing their 'death beds,' a lifeguard who discourses rationally on his mental breakdown preparatory to jumping off his balcony) both by a deliberately acute ear ('I am the earth, water, fire, and air heir') and an absolutely clear avoidance of conventional responses to our sacred concepts of death, fun, sex, money, and sanity. Each in its own way is an enticing mythic encounter in which the hero creates his own dragon from modem society - a bailbondsman playing detective (and god) with a faithful employee (and murderer) a wealthy idealist who tries to purify himself for the love of a dying virgin only to end up making love to a bear in a three-dimensional art landscape a 37 year-old virgin has-been lecturer who becomes a symbolic Oedipal failure as he falls to live out his father's existence in a nice Jewish condominium in Chicago. Three novellas by the marvelous black-comic author of Boswell, The Dick Gibson Show, and Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers.

The Dick Gibson Show by Stanley Elkin