More of a rough approximation than an imaginative penetration of the period.
Motion, the distinguished British man of letters, has retained the two principals of Silver (2012), his robust sequel to Stevenson’s Treasure Island, but otherwise, this is a stand-alone frontier novel.
Those principals are young Jim Hawkins, same-named son of Stevenson’s cabin boy, and Natty Silver, the biracial tomboy daughter of rascally Long John and his Caribbean wife. Shipwrecked off Texas in 1802, the only survivors, they are captured by Native Americans (Red Indian “savages,” thinks narrator Jim), escorted through the wilderness to their settlement, and imprisoned. The fearsome chief, Black Cloud, sports a magnificent silver necklace, a power source, which Jim will steal after a surprisingly easy escape. His theft sets in motion a dilatory yearslong pursuit by the chief, the only throughline the novel offers. Jim and Natty ride away on stolen ponies. Though he has declared his love for her, he doesn’t act on it. At key moments it's Natty who's the decision-maker, leaving Jim a blank slate recording their impressions. “They made a very pretty picture,” concludes Jim, after they meet a much different, peace-loving tribe, and indeed Motion, a former poet laureate, provides many pretty pictures. Action is harder to come by. The English adventurers spend an idyllic two years with these friendly Indians, who offer sanctuary until Black Cloud reappears. They then throw in with some traveling entertainers, but their gig is interrupted by the chief, who is wounded but not by Jim; this further undercuts his position. More travel gets them to the climax in New Orleans. Jim has learned that Indians vary greatly, from fierce to friendly to destitute, but has he learned much about himself? To the recurring question of why he must keep that troublesome necklace, he can only answer “We’re like our fathers,” to which Natty assents.
More of a rough approximation than an imaginative penetration of the period.Pub Date: July 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8041-3845-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
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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