Murdoch's third novel, following her melodramatic In Her Own Image and the rambling saga Family Business, is in another mood entirely; call it Norman Rockwell on a bender, since it's the caperish story of Pericles Morgan's last months on earth—which prove anything but uneventful. The Morgan family sends out a call to Pericles's niece, Joelene Mathiesen, a California widow, to come home to care for the old cuss. So Joelene packs her persimmon-colored Mustang and, along with teen-age son George, takes off, completely unaware that there's a fortune in large bills hidden under the back seat- -the property of her crooked ex-boyfriend, Don Diamond, who owes the dough to a gang of Colombian thugs. In the Hudson River village where she grew up, she finds Uncle Percy as difficult, unwashed, and unredeemed as ever, and she also discovers something else: a gigantic ark, which the duffer's been building for the last 30 or so years. Meanwhile, George, a problem child at best who wears an earring, dotes on the Grateful Dead, and smokes pot, turns out to be a fine companion for Uncle Percy, and Joelene meets a nice volunteer fireman named Pete. But then Don Diamond shows up with his bumbling henchman Ernie in pursuit of the loot, which, it turns out, George has found and hidden in sandbags at the ark construction site. There's a shoot-'em-up, during which Uncle Percy checks out, but a happy ending in store for Joelene and George nonetheless. Murdoch writes well—always has, in fact—but hasn't yet, it seems, stumbled on the right material. Here, she's eminently cute and quirky, but her story's thin, striving to be touching but generally landing in puddles of sitcom situation and sentiment.
Pub Date: May 22, 1991
ISBN: 0-06-018303-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1991
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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