A well-turned tribute to the freedom and frustrations of a diverse city.
A ragtag group of refugees from war, corruption, and domestic violence attempts to resettle in Nigeria’s chaotic capital in Onuzo’s second novel (The Spider King’s Daughter, 2012).
When Chike decides to desert the Nigerian army, unable to abide its violence against innocent citizens, he plans to travel light. But Yemi, one of the privates under his command, wants out, too; together, they soon meet Fineboy, another deserter; then Isoken, a young woman who’ll be raped if left with her family; then Oma, who's escaping her abusive husband. Together they travel to Lagos, which is hard on newcomers with limited means: The only shelter they can afford is in a camp town under a bridge, and the quintet can only piece together side hustles. (Chike’s brief stint directing traffic is at once comic and scarifying.) Fineboy stumbles across what seems to be an abandoned furnished apartment, but they’re actually squatting in the home of Sandayo, a former education secretary who’s stolen funds in hopes the money will go directly to schools instead of being squandered by bureaucrats. Onuzo’s novel is at once a Robin Hood tale and a cross section of Nigerian society, and though she takes on a lot in terms of both themes and characters, she shepherds it along smoothly. She avoids grand defining statements about Lagos, smartly letting the predicaments of each character show how the city’s lawlessness runs parallel to its bustle. (“Lagos would kill you if you wasted time on yesterday,” she writes.) Simplified statements are for the smug BBC reporter parachuting in to cover Sandayo’s story. (“One giant trash can,” he thinks.) Not every character gets his or her due (a romantic subplot involving a muckraking journalist feels unfinished), but the novel is marked by lively storytelling throughout.
A well-turned tribute to the freedom and frustrations of a diverse city.Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-936787-80-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Catapult
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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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