A novel within a novel that’s well worth a read.
McRaven (Build Me a Tower, 2016, etc.) offers a tale of violence, revenge, and love in the early American republic, interlocked with a love story set two centuries later.
In the late 1700s, Adam Kyle is a noted Revolutionary War gunsmith whose young wife and two children are killed when an infamous villain known as Red Beard shoots it out with a ragtag militia. Adam pursues him from Pennsylvania all the way to the Carolinas, where, he’s told, Red Beard dies of his wounds and lowland fever. A broken Adam moves to eastern Tennessee to try to begin anew. Two hundred years down the line, David Kyle, one of Adam’s many descendants, is a restorer of cabins (just as author McRaven is). His cousin Dane’s widow, Harriet, has inherited a piece of property with a run-down cabin on it—the very cabin that Adam built for his betrothed, Constance Green, so many years ago. David and Harriet fall in love, and while restoring the cabin, they discover an old manuscript telling the true story of Adam, his courtship of Constance, and his dealings with the mysterious, ambitious John Cabell. A sidebar to this story involves the legendary “super rifle” that Adam built for Cabell, since lost. Gradually, Adam and others begin to suspect that there is something mysterious about Cabell—something, in fact, that’s unsavory. In good time and dramatic fashion, the storylines of the Kyle clan of eastern Tennessee come to a ripping conclusion. Overall, McRaven is a talented writer who’s created, in David, an especially believable and likable narrator. At the same time that David and Harriet are editing the manuscript that they discovered in the cabin, the author cleverly depicts David restoring the cabin itself, showing how Adam and his story are in the process of being figuratively restored. Readers also get some intriguing snippets of McRaven’s own expertise (smithing, masonry, and so on) along the way.
A novel within a novel that’s well worth a read.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-944962-37-1
Page Count: 388
Publisher: Secant Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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