The James Boys
A Novel Account of Four Desperate Brothers
گزارش تخلف
کتاب های مرتبط
- اطلاعات
- نقد و بررسی
- دیدگاه کاربران
نقد و بررسی
April 28, 2008
Former Basic Books editor Liebmann-Smith, who cocreated Comedy Central's The Tick
, takes “what's in a name?” to amusing extremes in his debut novel. Novelist Henry James and Harvard psychologist William James really did have two younger brothers, neither of whom amounted to much. That situation changes drastically in Liebmann-Smith's goofball historical conceit, part The Bostonians
and part Blazing Saddles
. In 1876, Henry James travels by train on a New York Tribune
–commissioned journalistic tour. When the train is suddenly ambushed by a group of bandits led by Frank and Jesse James, the latter exclaims, on encountering the novelist: “Holy shit.... It's Harry!” The jokes and historical squiblets go off like six-guns in the 200-plus pages that follow, with Frank and Jesse James starring as the wayward brethren of the illustrious New England Jameses (which, in real life, they most certainly were not). Liebmann-Smith includes enough plot, to keep this single-joke, creatively imagined biography chugging along.
April 15, 2008
Liebmann-Smith is an accomplished comedy writer with numerous scripts, magazine articles, and book collaborations to his credit; in his first novel, he posits the hilariously outrageous conceit that Frank and Jesse James were the younger brothers of Boston's William and Henry James. The tale starts in 1876 with a James gang train robbery, which reunites Henry with the younger brothers he had thought were dead, and ends with Henry's death in 1916. Never in the history of the American West has an outlaw gang so botched their banditry, as detailed in a bullet-by-bullet retelling of the 1876 Northfield Bank raid. Written chiefly from Henry's point of view, this story apes James's literary stylean unfortunate decision that turns what could have been an interesting story into an almost unreadable mass of ten-page character portraits and overblown literary jargon that will leave most readers either baffled or fumbling for their dictionary. Absquatulated, indeed! A lot of cleverness and a lot of biography went into this novel, but Liebmann-Smith mishandled the tale as badly as Frank and Jesse bungled Northfield. Recommended for literary masochists only. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 3/1/08.]Ken St. Andre, Phoenix P.L.
Copyright 2008 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
دیدگاه کاربران