Ultimately unsatisfying historical fiction with some interesting moments. In her hardcover debut, Riefe, who claims to be of Mohican ancestry, plumbs the history of the five Indian nations that composed the Iroquois Confederacy. The grouping became a central player and pawn in the protracted struggle between the French and English for control of North America. Their alliance with the latter may have been decisive in the outcome of the so-called French and Indian Wars, which sealed the fate of New France. Into this situation of warfare and intrigue sails (literally) Margaret Addison Lacroix, an English aristocrat who has been married by proxy to a French officer serving in Quebec. She is journeying up the Hudson when her ship becomes grounded on a sandbar. A sitting duck, the vessel is attacked by Mohawks. All are killed and the ship is set ablaze. Only Margaret narrowly manages to escape. She is found and rescued by Two Eagles, war chief of the Oneidas, who thinks she is Ataentsic, the woman who, according to legend, fell from the sky and is credited with creating the earth. As the two (along with other members of Two Eagles's party) journey deeper into Indian country, the Native's civilized and human demeanor is contrasted sharply with that of Margaret's husband, a debauching, cheating, murdering drunkard. Eventually delivered to Quebec and to Governor-General Frontenac (a real-life personage whose Treaty of Ryswik put a temporary stop to the wars during the period in which this novel is set), Margaret finds out, to her ultimate relief, that Lacroix has not married her by proxy and, lacking mutuality, the union is void. Lacroix is imprisoned and Margaret is left with no doubt that it is not the Indians who are savages here in the Americas. Well-researched and generally a brisk read, the novel still comes up short, curiously lacking resonance to compel the reader.
Pub Date: July 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-312-85446-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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