An adventure full of surprises but hampered by uneven dialogue.
A historical novel chronicles one Jewish immigrant’s strange journey.
Readers first meet Avrum Vishinsky in 1898. Avrum is a 9-year-old boy in a small village in Poland that, due to hostilities with Cossacks and some bizarre circumstances involving heavy smoke, suffers a bloody pogrom. Avrum and his brother Hershel are the only villagers to survive. The brothers’ only hope for carrying on is to attempt to make it to a synagogue in Lvov. It is a lengthy and dangerous trek to Lvov and the two encounter an old woman who beats them with a fire poker. The woman even attempts to enslave Avrum while Hershel flees into the woods. Avrum’s salvation comes in the form of a lumberman named Iannuk. Iannuk takes Avrum under his wing, and the boy grows to become a powerfully built man of the woods. Eventually, Avrum secures passage on a ship to Montreal, and it is there that he will work, marry, search for his long-lost brother (who is rumored to have made it to New York City), and become a popular wrestler. Avrum’s tale is bizarre, though not unbelievable, and marked at points by raw violence. A scene involving a gang rape is brutal, showing readers that the New World could be just as unforgiving as the Old. But the dialogue is not always as imaginative as the physical confrontations. Avrum is initially hesitant to give wrestling a try since, as he puts it, “From the papers I know that wrestlers are half and half underworld.” And the members of that netherworld, with names like Horse and Zed Chicago, tend to speak exclusively in a clichéd gangster dialect, as when Zed explains: “I had a couple words with Horse. He said the kid should be good material and I tol’ him I’ll look’im over.” Despite such distractions, Holtzman’s (Dead-End Sex, 2016, etc.) story maintains a sense of excitement. What, in the end, will happen to Avrum? He is a man who has seen and survived so very much, and readers will likely be eager to know if he will ever find a happy ending.
An adventure full of surprises but hampered by uneven dialogue.Pub Date: March 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-977981-84-4
Page Count: 409
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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