A young woman's rites of passage in Iowa before the Great War- -limned in a first novel of much craft and too little vitality. In a story that blends a traditional loss of innocence with mythic Celtic beliefs, and that's set in a prosperous midwestern household of the early 20th century, Esstman recounts how Anna Berter is tested, falters, but triumphantly comes through (as is obligatory in the genre)—though at a price. As a child, Anna loved to listen to the stories told by the Old One, a housekeeper from Scotland, of ``selchies''—magical seals that Celts believe can assume human form. The Old One and her granddaughter Edwina provide the warmth and affection that the young Anna seems unable to get from her perfectionist mother (``the Prussian''). But this slightly flawed Eden is threatened when a son of her mother's old friend comes for an extended visit. He soon seduces Edwina, whom he equally soon abandons when she gives birth to a little girl, Rose, whom Anna's mother and father adopt against Edwina's will. Driven mad by grief, Edwina haunts the family, and Anna, forbidden to see her beloved Old One, is puzzled by her family's harsh behavior—but not for long. In sporadic episodes of defiance, she takes baby Rose to visit the Old One and Edwina in their tumbledown cabin, where she learns the extent of her mother's cruelty, as well as a mystery about her own birth. Time passes slowly, and adolescent Anna—torn between affection for her parents and abhorrence of their treatment of Edwina—confronts her parents only when it's too late to avoid the inevitable tragedy. But Anna will survive because she has the ``selchies.'' Just thinking of them, it seems, will keep her safe in the years ahead. Full of good intentions—and not much else.
Pub Date: April 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-15-170410-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1993
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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