Startling, vivid, unforgettable: a novel that compels the reading imagination.
With this stunning incantation on the life of Doc Holliday, Olds solidifies the reputation he established with his debut about John Brown (Raising Holy Hell, 1995) as the Dark American Soothsayer.
By nature a poet with an extraordinary sensitivity to the sounds of words, Olds here sets out a biography of sorts: a character-chant that, like his first novel, makes use of contemporary news accounts, interviews both real and invented, fragments of poetry, excerpts from textbooks, and photographs that flavor the original writing as it deals out the tale of Doc Holliday’s life. “In the end, the object is always the same—to reconnoiter the poetry that lies at the heart of any history, to make the marrow sing,” he writes in an afterword. Olds approaches his subject first through themes, providing both a clinical and a personal account of the consumption diagnosed at 21 that finally killed Holliday at 36, then nicely dovetailing this material into a treatment of Doc’s penchant for gambling. Olds carries the motifs of life and fate, gambling and luck straight to the center of the American fascination with fortune and individual enterprise, composing a critique unprecedented in its acuity and grace. He next presents Doc’s life among friends, drawing portraits of Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earp, and Bat Masterson that leave the weathered chaps, ten-gallon hats, and quick-draw machismo far behind. After rendering the mythical confrontation at the OK Corral in gorgeous, operatically controlled prose, Olds concludes with Doc’s dreamy, craven, painful death in a bed bloodied by his coughing. Characteristically, the author heads for the fringes of American culture yet declines to write in a style that simply mirrors his subject, instead seeding the tale with his own style of ravishment. He wields the most lyrically lucid prose and poetically charged sensibility this country’s literature has known in a very long while.
Startling, vivid, unforgettable: a novel that compels the reading imagination.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-374-11727-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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