A lively evocation of black college life at a pivotal point in American history.
An open-minded Jewish student at Howard University provides a guide to black America in the 1960s.
This timely meditation on race relations of the ’60s, written through the eyes of a young Jewish man who willingly immerses himself in a majority-black community, is both a debut memoir and a debut novel for psychologist Wolfe (Treatment of Panic Disorder: A Consensus Development Conference, 1994). Like his protagonist, Isadore White, Wolfe attended historically black Howard University in the ’60s. In this “novelized memoir,” Wolfe’s alter ego grows up in a Washington, D.C., even more segregated than it is today: “Social mixing just isn’t done.” Young Izzy’s reality is that of the lower-middle-class Jewish enclave he’s born into, and he only encounters his black contemporaries on Canteen Night at the Coolidge High Gymnasium, where he hones his basketball skills. Almost immediately, he finds himself liking them, wondering, “Why should these decent guys be the subject of such hatred and fear?” When he realizes that his family can’t afford George Washington University, he decides to enroll in Howard, to the horror of his father: “Izzy, don’t be such a meshuganah.” His dad rails against the “communists and queers” Izzy will encounter there. To the contrary, even though Izzy finds the hallways “dark and the laboratories dreary,” he can’t speak highly enough of his fellow students. He learns about the everyday horrors of segregated life and falls for a beautiful black student named Desirie Jackson, who initiates him into sexual mysteries and challenges him to have the courage of his convictions and work as a real activist instead of a well-wisher. Wolfe obviously knows whereof he writes, and his descriptions of the tense atmosphere that preceded the 1963 March on Washington and the pure pleasure of dancing “The Birdland, The Slop, the Snap, the Chicken, and the Mashed Potato” come alive on the page. Izzy, a dance contest winner, learns all his moves from watching black teenagers on TV: “I would study how black teenagers dance. It was so much smoother and more rhythmic than the white kids.” The book’s layout is curious: some paragraphs are broken with a space in between and some aren’t, and punctuation errors abound (many commas and periods appear outside the quotation marks). But this lack of polish proves to be surprisingly little trouble for the reader: the story that Wolfe tells is an important and rewarding one.
A lively evocation of black college life at a pivotal point in American history.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-692-45254-7
Page Count: 452
Publisher: The Wolfe Forest Publishing Company
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.
Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.
Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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