A further exploration of slavery and the African diaspora by West Indian-born and British-reared Phillips (The Final Passage, 1990, etc.), which, for all its ambition, reads more like a term paper than a novel. Intent on showing the pervasive and malign effect of slavery on both slave and slaveholder, Phillips has two narrators whose stories parallel but never really connect. The slave trade is ended, but not slavery, when 30-ish and unmarried Emily sails to a nameless Caribbean island to report on conditions on her father's plantations. Her feelings about slavery are confused—``I am not sure of what I am''—which is intentional, given her role as a somewhat impersonal conduit for information and observations on slave behavior, the slaves' African heritage, and life on the plantation, which is the setting for her education. Strangely isolated from the island community, Emily talks mostly to Stella, the slave housekeeper; the local doctor; and the overseer, Arnold Brown, a caricature of the type. Brown suddenly seduces Emily, who has hitherto been quite critical of him. But Emily as a beneficiary, however innocent, of slavery must suffer: Brown is murdered, and Emily gives birth to a still-born child. The other narrator, who tells a much shorter story, is Cambridge, an aging slave. On the eve of his execution for the murder of Brown, who had been molesting his deeply disturbed wife, he recalls his journey from Africa to England, where he was freed and educated, and the misfortune that brought him back to slavery. Emily is a synthetic creation, and only the slave Cambridge has some credibility, but even he is subordinated to theme. Fiction that manipulates rather than illuminates—which is pity because when he mutes the message, Phillips can write.
Pub Date: Feb. 5, 1992
ISBN: 0-679-40532-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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