A sunny look at the dark side, as a poster group—a Vietnam vet, an Asian immigrant, a Native American, and an African- American widow’serendipitously find happiness at an Oklahoma diner. Letts (Where the Heart Is, 1995, etc.), while a deft scene-setter, offers characters whose pain seems a plot accessory to be worn until something better comes along—and whose ultimate happiness feels as superficial as their previous misery. First, there’s Vietnam vet Carney, who lost his legs in the war and now runs the cafÇ. Helping him is widow Molly O, worried about her runaway teenage daughter Brenda, who wants to be a country music star. Also hanging out are locals like widower —Life,— who has his eye on Moll; notorious gossip Wanda Sue; and three old Cherokee friends and WWII vets, Hooks, Soldier, and Quentin. Carney, a former rodeo star, is so depressed that he never goes outside—until Native American Vena Take Horse arrives one evening with a wounded dog in her arms (and a lot of psychic baggage). Vena’s past includes drug addiction, a bad marriage, and an abortion, and she’s still grieving over favorite sister Helen’s suicide. But she loves animals, knows old Indian remedies, and soon has the dog cured and Carney back on horseback—and in love with her. To add to the mix and help Carney sort out his feelings about —Nam is the new cook, Vietnamese immigrant Bui, who’s saving his wages to bring his wife over to the States. Bui angers Sam, a local bigot who dies whole trying to kill him, after which Bui wins the friendship of African-American Galilee when he rebuilds her church. Vena, now pregnant and still troubled by her past, runs away, but she finds herself again, and everyone—including newly arrived Bui’s wife—gathers back at The Honk and Holler to celebrate. Happiness lite.
Pub Date: June 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-446-52158-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1998
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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