An upbeat but odd tale of kindness and redemption in the face of vast trauma.
In this novel, an aging Southern doctor takes in a runaway sex worker, much to the consternation of the women in his life.
Nineteen-year-old Lisa Higgins has just escaped the men who trafficked her for the last three years, shuttling her through black market brothels between Detroit and Miami. She isn’t out of the woods just yet. As she sits on a park bench in Bowling Green, Kentucky, she knows her former captor, Big John, is still looking for her. Then comes a chance encounter with Michael “Doc” McGinley, a septuagenarian widower who struggles to fill his days with meaning since retirement. He wants to do what he can to help the troubled young woman despite knowing almost nothing about her: “I believe the Good Lord puts people in our path, and it’s up to us how we respond. Nothing may come of this, but if it does, it was meant to be. Simple as that.” He offers her the apartment above his garage. It takes a full week for Lisa to take Doc up on his proposal—and even then she plans to rob him and move on—and her appearance greatly displeases his daughter, Jennifer, a university professor in England home for Christmas break. Despite the escalating tensions between Jennifer and Lisa—the former catches the latter stealing her dead mother’s possessions—Doc lets the young woman stay in exchange for helping out around the house. Doc’s neighbor Grace Ann Marshall is enlisted to aid Lisa in getting her GED certificate, though Grace Ann’s feelings about both the runaway and Doc himself are complicated. As the four people get used to the new living situation—one that is uncomfortable for everyone—they find unexpected opportunities to confront some of the long unresolved issues in their pasts.
Gildersleeve’s prose is sunny and smooth, and, despite the subject matter, he generally avoids offering readers anything too gruesome or explicit. Here, Grace Ann reacts to Lisa’s asking her if she’s ever seen pornography: “Grace Ann was caught off guard by words in such stark contrast to the beautiful setting. ‘No, I can honestly say I never have. Been tempted, since I understand it’s so easy to find on the Internet. But no, I haven’t. Why do you ask?’ ” The book is meant to be wholesome and inspirational, centered on the munificence of Doc (whom the author explicitly likens to Gregory Peck’s portrayal of Atticus Finch in the film To Kill a Mockingbird) and the inherent goodness of Lisa. But the author has perhaps bitten off more than he can chew with the topic of human trafficking. The difficult subject often feels incongruous to the novel’s tone: Lisa’s “counselors knew the horror of what happened to her, and hundreds of thousands of others like her in this country alone, is a far cry from the Hollywood glamorization of prostitution in movies like Pretty Woman, Never on Sunday and Irma la Douce.” Much of the book focuses on the other characters’ more mundane struggles with love and loss. Generous readers may be satisfied by the warm ending, but some will feel otherwise.
An upbeat but odd tale of kindness and redemption in the face of vast trauma.Pub Date: Nov. 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64438-044-4
Page Count: 298
Publisher: Booklocker.com
Review Posted Online: June 18, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
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
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