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THE CHESS GARDEN

OR THE TWILIGHT LETTERS OF GUSTAV UYTERHOEVEN

Big subjects like history, religion, and science mingle awkwardly with Tolkien-like fantasy in Hansen's first solo fictionall about an aging doctor who finds spiritual solace in an imaginary continent inhabited by game pieces. When the story, told in letters and flashbacks, opens, the flood of 1912 is threatening the Uyterhoeven home in Dayton, Ohio. Mrs. Uyterhoeven has just died, and an old friend is moving the contents of various cabinets and drawers to safetycontents that, together with the Uyterhoevens themselves, will become the main actors here. The biographical detailsthe birth and distinguished academic career of Dutch-born Dr. Gustav Uyterhoeven; his marriage to Sonja, daughter of a barge captain; his growing discontent with rational science; the death of an only son; an encounter with a Swedenborgian minister that changes his life and brings him to Ohioare secondary to the letters he writes home from South Africa, where he's gone as a medical volunteer during the Anglo-Boer war. Beginning in late 1900, Uyterhoeven records in letters accompanied by chess pieces his adventures in the imaginary ``Antipodes''letters eagerly awaited back in Ohio, where friends gather in the Uyterhoeven chess garden to hear them read. The geography of the ``Antipodes'' resembles a series of game boards; and after many adventures in which he meets good and bad bishops, dominoes that form bridges, dice that show the way, and vandals led by sinister figures, Uyterhoeven begins to accept his son's death and life's pain. He is waiting, he says in his last letter, to tell the barge-toting queen he met earlier that ``I have seen her son and he is in heaven.'' Colorful details, idiosyncratic characters, and an intriguing search for meaning are all here but never quite connect up. Hansen (coauthor of Boone, not reviewed) echoes rather than equals or advances the achievements of Tolkien, Carroll, and Lewis.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995

ISBN: 0-374-16015-5

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995

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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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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

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

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

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