An overly long yet honest account of a family ensnared by tragedy.
In Ark’s (Pants on Fire!, 2013) novel, an artist in Hawaii loses her philandering husband to a younger woman, then two of her children to suicide.
The morning of their 25th wedding anniversary, Bullet Pulaski tells his wife, Lucky, that he wants a divorce. Leaving her and his three children, he moves in with one of his art students yet continues for months to wander in and out of the family home and the studio where Lucky fires pottery and he paints. Lucky is fully developed: Her Catholic upbringing has been eclipsed by tarot readings and New Age spirituality; an early desire to perform onstage was discarded in favor of motherhood, a deep commitment to her art and an overwhelming need for love. Though at first she aches for her husband, as his narcissistic behavior worsens and she recalls years of indignities endured, her love turns bitter, fueling a divorce every bit as nasty as her parents’. The scenes Ark writes are vivid and real—Christmas morning destroyed when Bullet’s pet donkey devours breakfast, or Lucky, when she is desperate for sensation, kissing her own arm and masturbating with “Moby Pickle” from the fridge. The divorce goes on and on, and time grows soupy, with the story stalling amid the depression and chaos. There are confusing jumps through time; Ark writes that “1989, 1990, 1991 had come and gone…and no divorce,” though about 140 pages later, “fourteen months had passed since Lucky filed for divorce.” Two men wander into and out of her life, but the pain they cause is trifling compared with the losses that will come. As tragedy overtakes Lucky, the prose is eloquently anguished: “How did she find herself still there, isolated on a windswept shore in the midst of the great Pacific, her womb wrenched loose as though ripped and fed upon by grief-starved sharks?”
An overly long yet honest account of a family ensnared by tragedy.Pub Date: June 12, 2014
ISBN: 978-0988476219
Page Count: 514
Publisher: ARABELLA ARK
Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 2014
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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