A cast of compelling characters with provocative tales frustratingly fractured.
As Tara journeys from India to America to help her sister, Kamala, at every turn she befriends people coping with their own cultural dislocations.
Kamala has called on Tara to watch over her daughter, Lavi, while she takes her son, Rahul, to see an Ayurvedic doctor. She’s hoping for some miracle to treat his autism, which has made the simplest errand fraught with anxiety, imperiled his place at school, and strained her marriage. Over the course of Viraraghavan’s debut novel, Rahul’s autism becomes a metaphor for the immigrant experience of mute bewilderment in the face of a confusing landscape. An Indian grandfather visits his daughter and her family, yet she barely acknowledges his presence, leaving him to meditate upon the crowded loneliness of America. An Israeli woman seeks a new life with a new husband she met on the beach and a new, less stressful job as a housekeeper only to find herself a distrusted stranger in her employer’s home. A graduate student in biology notices an alarming level of surveillance and ethnic profiling. A recent immigrant working for a seedy Indian restaurant suspects his boss of participating in the sex-slave trade. The husband and wife of an arranged marriage struggle to find happiness neither can give the other. Threading through their stories are the school book reports of a mysterious Danisha. Indeed, the land of opportunity repeatedly disappoints, provoking impassioned responses, ranging from infidelity to paranoid delusions. Viraraghavan shifts the narrative perspective, with each new chapter (many as brief as one page) taking up the thread of one of several tales. Consequently, no one story gains momentum, cut off just as the tension begins to build and suspended while several other characters’ stories resume play.
A cast of compelling characters with provocative tales frustratingly fractured.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-93-5136-985-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Fourth Estate
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
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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