A fine, magnetic debut novel.
Reclusive psychologist Kit Gillespie muses upon the death of his world-wandering longtime girlfriend Julia in Taylor's (Travel Light & Other Stories, 2013) debut novel.
On a train to Montreal, Kit sketches an attractive Asian woman whom he christens “Alice.” He’s finally taking a trip away from Ottawa after finding out that Julia drowned “up north.” She was an ESL teacher who sought assignments around the world while Kit worked as a “decent therapist—easy-to-talk-to and boring-to-be with.” He is also, as Julia called him, a “hermit” who didn’t even attend the wedding of good friend Alf in Scotland. In Montreal, Kit keeps sketching, a hobby that he never revealed to Julia, and also begins a relationship with cafe owner Louise, initially introducing himself under a different name. He crosses paths with “Alice,” who is actually Sally, a psychiatrist. Kit goes out to dinner with her but is spooked by her intense questioning. He returns to Ottawa to see his current patients; ruminate on his ongoing friendship with former patient Angela, who often probes him about Julia; and reread Julia’s letters, the only form of communication he had with her when they were apart. He sends some of these letters to Sally, which leads to intensive therapy sessions with her back in Montreal and new steps for Kit, including a trip to Scotland and possibly more travels to come. First-time novelist Taylor (Travel Light & Other Stories, 2013) brings a key character from his previous short story collection into this beautifully written first-person narrative that fits within the tradition of A Gesture Life and The Remains of the Day. While Julia drowned, it’s Kit who is truly underwater; Taylor creates a well-drawn portrait of this character’s struggle for self-awareness and expression, particularly in the scenes depicting Kit’s secret sketching and enjoyment of Ottawa parks. The description of Julia’s final journey late in the novel is a bit rushed and confusing, although it also serves, as do most details in this narrative, to show Kit’s shifting perspective.
A fine, magnetic debut novel.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2015
ISBN: 978-1460262023
Page Count: 336
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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