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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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