An intriguing, well-constructed story that follows two kindred souls across the decades.
In Lischke’s debut novel, the lives of two women seem mysteriously linked across the century that separates them.
Jane Eliot is a young married woman coping as best she can with a few frustrations. A strange palsy has afflicted her right hand, largely preventing her from pursuing her love of drawing. Also, she and her CPA husband, David, are childless; Jane previously had two miscarriages and is beginning to despair of ever having a baby of her own. Almost equally unnerving are the vivid dreams that Jane keeps having: glimpses from the life of a 19th-century woman named Elizabeth Brewer. She’s a wealthy mother of five who volunteers her time to teach at a gritty city workhouse, partly out of altruism and partly out of a fascination she feels for the workhouse master, Jordan Locke. At first, Jane is more bemused than alarmed by these recurring dreams, until they begin intruding on her waking life. As the intense visions grow in clarity, Jane becomes frustrated to the point of fear (“ ‘What in the name of God do you want?’ she shouted. That was the way to address a ghost. A ghost in my head?”). Lischke adroitly handles the tension between the two eras of her story, shifting from Jane’s world to Elizabeth’s and back again at key dramatic moments. The events of Elizabeth’s life provide Jane with insights into everything from her marriage to her miscarriages. Lischke excels at creating believable dialogue between Jane and her friends and evoking atmospheric period details of Elizabeth’s existence, including descriptions of the squalid workhouse and the inmates there, some of whom refuse to yield to despair. The past-lives hypnosis and “regression” therapy toward the novel’s climax may strike some readers as a trifle pat, but the drama as a whole is entirely convincing.
An intriguing, well-constructed story that follows two kindred souls across the decades.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9911597-8-9
Page Count: 238
Publisher: SDP Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2015
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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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