A Mississippi belle totes all sorts of trendy baggageand a few southern gothic staplesin a first novel based on a real-life governor's daughter who tried to be different in a less-than- hospitable milieu and time. The purchase of a desk that belonged to a former Mississippi governor, Stephen Dunbar, and the discovery by a local antique dealer of a cache of Dunbar papers provide the opening frame for the story of Lizzie Dunbara story that begins in 1902, when Lizzie is born and father Stephen takes her dead, deformed twin brother and throws him into a pond. Neither Lizzie nor her mother will never even know that the child existed, but Genesis, the obligatory trusty black Mammy, does, and she will always hold Stephen responsible for what later happens. A chorus of voices, including Lizzie's own, carry the story on from 1902 to tell how this ``belle in her day, though wilder than most,'' came to spend the last 20 plus years of her life in the local asylum. Horrified by his son's deformity, Stephen avoids his gentle wife, who gradually fades away while he begins his political ascent. In 1916, he's elected governor, and Lizzie is sent off to Virginia to be educated as a lady. But Lizzie, whoin Stephen's opinionhas a boy's ``mind and spirit,'' soon gets into scrapes. She runs away to New York, where she meets Emma Goldman and Dorothy Day; gets seduced by a mysterious communist who infects her with syphilis; and then, ailing, returns home in 1919 to start a feminist newspaper and make further waves by hiring a black secretary. When the Dunbar money runs out during the Depression, Lizzie starts on the long decline that leads to her breakdown, her summary committal by Stephen, and her death in 1968. Poor Lizzie has to do, and stand for, so much that her collapse is an inevitable if melodramatic and predictable clichÇ. A lite read with lit pretensions.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-56352-227-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Longstreet
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1995
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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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