A complex, powerful concept strained by its own length and ambition.
Ware’s debut novel spans decades, taking on the abortion debate from the immediate aftermath of Roe v. Wade to the present day.
The first chapter begins in 1973. Candice can’t bear the thought of having a second child with her abusive husband. She visits Dr. Nixon, a small-town obstetrician who’s never performed an abortion, and he makes the procedure his life’s work. The book, however, doesn’t commit to one side of the debate. Dr. Nixon’s employees and family balk at his choices. Even his nephew, Robert, a medical student hoping to follow in his uncle’s footsteps, can’t understand his idol’s pro-choice position. The narrative then stretches toward the present, introducing Kyle Decker, an elusive bomber of abortion clinics; the cabal supporting him; and the FBI agents tasked with his capture. Little by little, the disparate plotlines begin to converge as Decker finds a lover and accomplice in Alice, and Robert wrestles with his uncle and his own morality. The variety of perspectives is a strength, but it comes at the expense of character development. In fact, any deeper exploration of the characters often ends up reduced to overly expository spurts: “This time, his mother’s laughing cruelty would not go unpunished…this woman, who had once tried to kill him, ‘her little abortion.’ ” Similarly inelegant prose appears throughout, blunting the complexity of the subject matter. The novel does its best to remain fresh, discarding points of view when they’ve served their purpose and maintaining a sense of emotional drama.
A complex, powerful concept strained by its own length and ambition.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-0692245415
Page Count: -
Publisher: Christmas Tree Press
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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