A mildly effective demonstration of why the things that go bump in the night aren’t nearly as bad as the skeletons in the...
A mother is determined to find out what is haunting her child and why.
Until the age of six, Charlie was a normal, fun-loving kid. Then he began acting strangely, adopting a completely different personality, entering trance-like states, knowing things about his parents without ever having been told and experiencing terrible visions and nightmares of people suffering great pain. While his father, David, is embarrassed by Charlie’s behavior and refuses to deal with it, his mother, Karen, secretly takes him to a parapsychologist, who suggests that Charlie is reliving events from someone else’s life. Karen suspects that Charlie is revisiting the life of Alex, David’s first son, who was killed in a car accident more than ten years earlier. Desperate to end Charlie’s torment, she begins to delve into her husband’s past. She visits the houses David lived in with Alex and his first wife, looking for specific clues that Charlie mentions while under hypnotic regression. Along the way, this erstwhile stay-at-home mom sneaks into a medical-records department, impersonates a bank auditor and attempts to find her way out of a cocaine-dealing biker’s locked basement. Ultimately, she discovers not only what is troubling her son, but some dark secrets about her husband as well. Though the story begins as a somewhat chilling, Sixth Sense–like thriller, the heroine eventually becomes involved in situations more comical than genuinely frightening, in scenes that feature increasingly sado-masochistic undertones. Readers drawn in by the quiet, effective spookiness may be disappointed by the sordid conclusion. Though certain plot twists strain the boundaries of credulity, they keep the pages turning.
A mildly effective demonstration of why the things that go bump in the night aren’t nearly as bad as the skeletons in the closet.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-595-40057-4
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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