Poet Louis debuts with a grim contemporary saga from South Dakota's Pine Ridge Reservation (where he teaches at Oglala Lakota College): a story full of brutality and whimsy, though so volatile a mix requires a greater talent than is revealed here. Rudy Yellow Shirt, longtime Pine Ridge policeman, is having a midlife crisis of epic dimensions—one exacerbated by the extreme poverty and degradation among his Oglala people. He's hypertensive, impotent; his wife is ready to leave him; and his job of rounding up winos—among them his brother—and investigating an unending string of murders and fatal accidents gives him no peace. When he hits his head on a rock while chasing rape-and-murder suspects, however, his life begins to change. A mental presence he calls the Avenging Warrior commits him to bursts of vigilante justice, leading him to break the knees of the murderers with a baseball bat and later to burn down a liquor store adjoining the reservation. His sex drive returns, too, but since his wife is already gone, he chases other women, including his cousin's wife. The cousin then conveniently drops dead, leaving nothing between Rudy and his desire, although first he has to put feelings for his soon-to-be- ex-wife behind him—which he does by raping her. Meanwhile, this dubious progress toward domestic harmony is complicated by the decline of older brother Mogie, Vietnam vet and star athlete turned permanent drunk, whom Rudy accidentally set on fire along with the liquor store. Mogie soon walks the spirit road when his liver fails, but not before the brothers are reconciled: at the close, Rudy will put his vengeful nature to rest by fulfilling Mogie's last request—pouring a bucket of red paint down Washington's face on Mount Rushmore. Not a pretty picture of reservation life, but even so the shock effects from both the violence and the humor are severely diluted by tin-eared dialogue and trite phrasing.
Pub Date: July 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-517-79958-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 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 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
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