Strong, grim, haunting portrait of a man inescapably marked by an act of violence, in a first novel by the author of the memoir The Same River Twice (1993). Virgil, a bright, restless, laconic young man, finds himself doubly burdened when his wild older brother Boyd is murdered. The hell-raising Boyd has been an essential part of Virgil's life, and Virgil's grief is pressing and deep. And, because life in his isolated corner of Kentucky has not been much altered by modern times, his family, his friends, and even the local sheriff expect Virgil to avenge Boyd's death by killing the local rough suspected of the deed. Reluctantly, and with growing despair, Virgil plots to do so. Afterward, he flees west, and the bulk of the novel is taken up with his life in the backwoods of Montana. The skills evident in Offutt's earlier writing, including his pitch-perfect rendition of the vivid, terse, often droll character of the spoken word, and his talent for vigorously, precisely describing rural blue-collar culture, its trailer courts and bars, struggling factories and backroad settlements, are once again on display. Virgil expects that Montana will offer him a chance to hide until he can puzzle out what to do. But the relatives of the man he murdered come searching for him, and, through yet another act of violence, he inadvertently falls in with modern militiamen who've declared war on the US government. Virgil, drawn to the strong, independent sister of one of the group's members, finds that, no matter how he tries, violence has become an inescapable part of his life. The apocalyptic ending is bloody, sad, and convincing. As a portrait of a good man's life shattered by violence, and as a meditation on the persistent attraction of violence in American society, Offutt's first fiction is persuasive, original, and disturbing. The work of a sizable talent. (Author tour)
Pub Date: June 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-80983-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1997
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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