Memphis-born blues singer Flowers (De Mojo Blues, 1986) moves back to hometown Beale Street in the 1920's—when the bluesmen were kings and jazz was still an upstart—for a colorful but erratic romance between two temperamental, headstrong people. Lucas Bodeen and Melvira Dupree are masters of their respective crafts—he as a fireballing blues pianist, she as a powerful conjure woman. The passion between them when they come together in Sweetwater, Arkansas, on the Mississippi delta befits a meeting of titans and proves to be more volatile than they can control. Melvira, restless after hearing the call of her long- vanished mother in a cock's crow, decides to move to Memphis in search of her, taking Bodeen with her. But back in his old stamping grounds, the hard-living, free-spirited Luke reemerges, causing the lovers to have a bitter falling out. When they part, he goes rapidly to ruin even while retaining his silver-tipped touch at the keyboard, but she finally is rewarded in her quest when the Memphis hoodoo king befriends her. Luke hits the road, returning home in time to witness his proud father's end, but in time he comes back through Memphis, forsaking future fame to rejoin Melvira on the final leg of her journey to her mother. Not even a furious Mississippi flood can deter them; and although she's powerless to stop the Baron (Death) from claiming the old woman, the circle that was broken is forged anew, so that Melvira and Bodeen ``lived happily ever after.'' Best in its blues scenes and delta moods, most disappointing in its lack of depth and continuity, with Melvira a shadowy character next to her man. Flawed, then, but not without its shining moments.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-670-84821-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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