A somewhat uneven collection that showcases the author’s keen eye for cultural detail and his affection for his characters.
In 16 short stories linked by a single narrator, Nimmo (Pele, Volcano Goddess of Hawai’i, 2011, etc.) sketches the world of a gay Iowa farm boy in the 1940s and ’50s.
Lachlan MacLennan is the fourth generation of his Scottish family to live in Tools Rock, a small farming town in central Iowa. The residents notice but tolerate one another’s eccentricities, including a communitywide obsession with the weather, and most people follow paths very similar to their parents’. But times are changing; Lach’s cousin Letha, a young woman, eschews marriage and leaves town to attend college in Chicago, and young Lach can foresee a life for himself far away from Tools Rock. As a child, he escapes Iowa for upstate New York when his father is hired to work in a wartime defense job and the family moves to an Army base. (Lach charmingly begins one story: “I always felt a little guilty because I had so much fun during World War II.”) After the war ends, the MacLennans return home, to Lach’s great disappointment: “No movies. No soldiers. No river. No army base. Nothing but cornfields. And all the people looked alike.” He acclimates himself again to Tools Rock, but he never really fits in. At an early age, he senses that he doesn’t share the attraction to girls that other boys have. His attempts to explore his own sexuality include repeatedly viewing explicit photographs that he discovered in his friend’s parents’ closet and, in college, making very awkward overtures to men who advertise on bathroom walls. However, as Nimmo portrays it here, growing up intellectually gifted and gay in a 1950s Iowa farm town isn’t very stressful for Lach. His very conventional family and friends accept him, and he manages to emerge unscathed into adulthood, ready to form mature relationships with other men. Some readers might construe this outcome as unrealistic. The prose style matches the personalities of the plainspoken Midwesterners (“Tools Rock had its share of strange people. Some were downright weird”), but readers might have welcomed more drama throughout.
A somewhat uneven collection that showcases the author’s keen eye for cultural detail and his affection for his characters.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2013
ISBN: 978-1493637614
Page Count: 210
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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