From the spry octogenarians who compose the town’s old guard to the scheming Darlene who has her hat set for Will, Holton’s...
Holton (Beach Trip, 2009) takes a trip to a small Tennessee town and finds a colorful cast with a long-hidden secret among the azalea bushes and magnolia trees.
Ava’s mother, the fanciful Clotilde, has died, her love affair has gone bad and her dreams of writing a novel are unrealized. When Will, an old friend from college days, invites her to come South for the summer, live with his elderly but well-to-do aunts and write her novel, Ava accepts. Soon she’s chucked the boyfriend and her job back in Chicago and headed for Woodburn, Tenn. Named after her friend Will’s family, Woodburn is a typical Southern town, peopled by colorful Southerners: There are Will’s aunts, the sweet, cat-loving Fanny, married to her childhood sweetheart, Maitland, and Josephine, the spinster with an iron will; Clara, the African-American who lives in the cottage behind the Woodburn’s grand home; Alice, whose gay son, Fraser, channels Edgar Allan Poe; and Darlene, the failed blond beauty queen who has her sights set on Will. And then, of course, there is Jake, who is also a Woodburn, but from the other branch of the family. Jake’s father was the son of Charlie Woodburn, a ne’er-do-well who married Fanny back during Prohibition. Charlie’s death from drowning decades ago fascinates Ava, who is convinced his demise was not the accident everyone seems to think it was. Holton skillfully weaves the stories of Ava and her vagabond early life with that of irrepressible but equally irresponsible Clotilde, together with those of Charlie and the Woodburn girls. The fun, witty dialogue strikes the right note, as does the attention to detail, from the iced sweet tea to the casual conversations of Woodburn’s residents.
From the spry octogenarians who compose the town’s old guard to the scheming Darlene who has her hat set for Will, Holton’s novel is brimming with unforgettable characters, smart conversations and an engaging mystery that makes spending a summer in the South a tantalizing proposition.Pub Date: May 24, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-345-50601-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011
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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