An often engaging rags-to-riches story with a fresh setting and a sympathetic hero.
In Mitra’s debut novel, a low-caste Indian man climbs the ladder of financial success while facing romantic difficulties.
Rahul Anthony Gomes comes from a poor Catholic community, but with his graduation from the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta business school, he has “forced [his] way into the merit society.” However, his relatives and friends warn him not to aim too high, because “[d]warfs shouldn’t try to reach for the moon.” During India’s late-1990s economic boom, with its loosening social strictures, Rahul keeps climbing higher. When he loses his job after refusing to quash a report predicting the dot-com crash, he gets a better position with a more ethical company. A fancy air-conditioned apartment, a company car, a generous expense allowance, a high salary—what more could he want? He still carries a torch for his ex-wife Anita, now remarried, whose “childhood problems weren’t addressed properly,” according to her therapist. She comes from a wealthy, well-connected Hindu family, and her mother drove her mercilessly to succeed. She reconnects with Rahul when she sees that his ambitions now seem to match her own. Will it work out a second time? Mitra, the national editor of India’s Hindustan Times, has plenty of experience reporting on the economic changes that have transformed the country. He uses that knowledge to good effect here, offering many fascinating glimpses of Indian and Calcuttan life; for example, he writes that post-colonial Calcutta “proceeded to rename snooty Harrington Street after Ho Chi Minh. Both the United States and the UK consulates are located on it.” However, some readers may lose interest in the back and forth between Rahul and Anita, as the same issues are rehashed again and again; too often, they’re tagged with pat answers, as if from a magazine advice column: “You weren’t communicating properly,” instructs one of Anita’s friends. “He found it difficult to accept the fact that you were doing so well.” These analyses may be true, but they’re much less compelling than, for example, Rahul’s difficult relationship with his mother.
An often engaging rags-to-riches story with a fresh setting and a sympathetic hero.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-1482710977
Page Count: 322
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2013
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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