This debut by a Michigan educational assessor is very much a book, not a collection of individual poems, all about the turn- of-century murderer known as Jack the Ripper. It’s also easy to see why Richard Howard, who, as the series editor, provides an introduction, was attracted to Buchanan’s elaborate construction: the bulk of the poems are dramatic monologues, a form best practiced in our time by Howard himself. The first sections of this grim volume are the weakest: Jack addresses a number of the women he murdered, providing the sick rationale for his acts. In one case, he fancies himself a poet inspired by Poe, in another an avenging angel. Each victim responds in kind: one sees her parents in Jack’s evil face, another speaks from the afterlife of vengeful witchcraft, and, best of all, one dispels his Poe pretensions. Buchanan’s voices in this early section seldom vary, and Jack sounds more like Jack Nicholson in The Shining than any fin de siäcle rogue. Buchanan interrupts his book with a prose section, “Ripperology,” that rehearses the evidence for the main real-life suspects in the case. After this, his verse truly takes off: each Jack, in language suitable to his background, explains his reasons for murder: the butcher confesses his grotesque love of necrophilia, cannibalism, and sex with meat; a priest describes sacramental killing as God’s will; and the failed poet (a real-life tutor to the Queen’s grandson) relies on bad ballads and rhymes to justify his actions. The two most plausible suspects, the Queen’s physician and her grandson, the Duke of Clarence, are motivated by drug-addiction and syphilitic madness. The woman-hating language of the speakers and the gruesome details of their actions are not for the faint of heart. But Buchanan has achieved something clever and powerful here: he’s revealed the mysteries of identity at the heart of a Victorian murder mystery.
Pub Date: July 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-57003-297-1
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Univ. of South Carolina
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1999
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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