The fifth novel by Rogan (A Heartbeat Away, 1993, etc.) takes us down a familiar road and into a thicket of blighted lives whose fortunes hinge upon a timely touch from the finger of God. The opening line sets the pace: ``Even though she'd asked for it, Sam Pollak could not help feeling guilty the day he killed his wife.'' But it's not what you think. Sam's wife Louise has cancer, and he puts her out of her misery at her own request. All the same, Sam is haunted by what he's done, and his guilt compounds his grief to a degree that makes his own life seem unbearable and pointless. A cabinetmaker and carpenter, Sam tries to lose himself in his work, and this brings him into the orbit of Jane Goncalves, a Manhattan social worker who's bought an old house in Sam's upstate village to use as a home for her foster children. While he works on the house, however, some of the local yahoos start agitating to run the children out of town, blaming them for a string of arsons that began as soon as they arrived. Sam keeps out of the politics for a while, but once he takes on one of Jane's children as an assistant, he's quickly drawn into the conflict. His own obsession with Louise's death, moreover, is nourished by a string of anonymous telephone calls he begins to receive late at night from someone who declares, ``I know what you did.'' A defrocked rabbi, a Brooklyn homegirl, several troubled yet adorable street urchins, a horny postmistress, and a gay football player provide some silly digressions from Sam's story. By the end, though he's not been healed of his loss, it's evident that the worst is behind him. Mawkish and overblown: Despite some good characters and a smooth voice, the sentiments are obvious to the point of caricature.
Pub Date: June 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-81414-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1996
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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