A worthwhile, though a bit overwritten, American story about family, friendship and hard work.
Tradition and progress collide in this novel about a steelworker’s daughter trying to find her way in the world.
When Fox’s debut opens, Belle Reinker’s life is defined by the West-Penn steel mill, Squirreltown, W.V.’s major employer. Belle’s father and her husband, Mike, both work at the mill, and Belle is the secretary of the union. But when the mill refuses to renew its contract with the union and the workers go on strike, Belle knows it signals the beginning of the end for the mill. To her family’s dismay, Belle resigns from her position so she can find a new job, although Mike points out that “there ain’t any fancy jobs waiting for a woman that never finished high school.” Without telling her family, Belle takes out a second mortgage and sets up a shoeshine stand in a nearby hotel. Her business thrives, but her marriage is strained—particularly when a newspaper article about Belle’s business makes her work public, embarrassing Mike and their teenage son. As Belle expands her business, Mike negotiates with the head of the mill about a tax abatement that might keep the mill in town—at the expense of the area’s schools. When the abatement and the union’s support of it become public, the town turns into “a tinderbox of an angrily divided polity.” Belle becomes a leader of the anti–tax abatement movement, along with handsome new arrival Terry Kellerman. Belle’s professional and political transformation deepens the wedge between her and her husband, perhaps moving her into Terry’s arms. Belle’s work against the abatement is only the beginning of her advocacy for her hometown, however, and she helps Squirreltown transform through conservation, new homes and tourism. But the former head of the mill decides to run for political office so he can facilitate new development—i.e., strip malls and low-income housing—in Squirrel Valley. Can Belle stop this new enemy and preserve Squirreltown once and for all? Fox succeeds in bringing the town to life and deftly establishes the conflict between the forces that divide it. Unfortunately, the multifaceted premise is sometimes undermined by awkward writing. Even though Fox emphasizes that his characters are direct straight shooters, he sprinkles pretentious vocabulary throughout the story. Mill workers nurse their beers in “tenebrous saloons,” a planned lodge is hailed as “cynosure of the entire valley,” and the old steel mill is “fuliginous.” In most cases, simpler language would have enhanced the story.
A worthwhile, though a bit overwritten, American story about family, friendship and hard work.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2013
ISBN: 978-1484089804
Page Count: 238
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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
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