Yellow Jack: A Novel

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant.
Review: This book is flat-out excellent. The writing is beautiful without overwhelming the strange, strange story; the "historical" aspect is handled deftly, without the trappings of 90s politics--the reader is never led, and this one certainly didn't have to be. This is literature. People should be carrying Josh Russell around on their shoulders. It's twisted and true, it's hot and bothered. Read it.

Rating:
Summary: An admirable attempt
Review: While the characters are strongly built and an interesting structural device has been built in, YELLOW JACK never quite gets off the ground. Every once in awhile the characters will do things simply to push the story in the direction the author wants, and the novel itself doesn't really seem to have a point or any sort of conviction. What is quite admirable are the museum catalog descriptions that extrapolate from the speaker's life based on his art, and then the actual descriptions on that life from the speaker himself. But in the end its not quite worth the effort.

Rating:
Summary: unusual and interesting
Review: Yellow Jack is an impertinent jig before the horrified eyes of readers of dreary "domestic" and "historical" realism. Russell's sensibility is not tainted by our literary legacy of East Coast Puritan aesthetics. Wonderfully refreshing!