Veteran author and translator Nathan (Living Carelessly in Tokyo and Elsewhere, 2008, etc.) returns with a historical novel that artfully fuses the immigrant experience of 1910s New York with dark romance and political intrigue.
By most measures, Abraham Cahan is a successful man—he’s the author of seminal works of Jewish immigrant fiction, a leftist political activist, a pillar of the community and an esteemed newspaper editor of the Yiddish-Socialist Forward, for which he writes an indispensable advice column. But a loveless, sterile marriage has left an emotional void in Cahan’s life, one exacerbated by his estrangement from the religious practices of his youth. So when a troubled woman writes the newspaper with a letter claiming familial sexual abuse, accompanied by a titillating photograph, Cahan ingratiates himself into her life with less than the purest motives. Though he vaguely suspects the situation is more than what it seems, he quickly finds himself drawn into a tangled plot with strands that seemingly lead to his professional competitors as well as the far more powerful interests of the Tammany Hall political machine. Before he knows it, Cahan’s reputation and fortunes teeter on the brink of ruin. Nathan’s rich, beautifully descriptive prose advances the story at a relaxed pace while realizing the crowded, variegated world of the Lower East Side in all its overstuffed essence. Nathan expertly characterizes Cahan, a historical figure, as a man tugged in many directions by competing forces: between Jewish shtetl culture and assimilationist modernity, between gradual socialist change and the forceful demands of revolutionaries, and between the need to maintain propriety and the desires of his heart. Although the writing is somewhat halting and stuffy in the early going, Nathan finds his stride just as the passions of his protagonist awaken and bloom. A well-rendered, appealing period piece.
Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2011
ISBN: 978-1456857493
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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
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