A big fish story, and breathy prose (“She looked at him standing onshore, and knew right then that it didn’t matter how many...
Third tearjerker from romancer Yorke (and her first hardcover), about a woman’s recovery from the loss of her baby son.
One day 18 years ago, Kate Vegas’s husband Ray and infant William vanished into thin air. Car accident? Kidnapping? Worse: Ray sold William for $50,000 to pay off his gambling debts, then ran off to Mexico. Kate’s father Gerald, an LAPD detective, pulled every string, but the investigation never came up with a lead, and he and Kate were left to recover from the shock on their own. Suicidally depressed for years after, Kate eventually became a foster mother and took a succession of troubled children into her home for months or years at a time. Her latest charge is Wayne, a 17-year-old who has recovered from drug addiction and wants to become a fisherman. Kate takes him up to Seal Bay, an old fishing town in northern California, to see whether he can find work on a crew. He takes a job on Ben Dodson’s boat, and Kate stays on for a while to see him settled into his new life. Ben is a widower with two daughters Wayne’s age, so he and Kate find themselves with a common bond and soon fall in love (as does Wayne with one of the Dodson girls). Yet Kate is still troubled by her loss of William after all these years, her grief sharpened into real fear as she begins to receive baby pictures of William anonymously through the mail. Is Ray trying to torment her? Is William still alive? Her only clue is a Cambridge, Massachusetts, postmark. But for a detective’s daughter, that’s enough to start with.
A big fish story, and breathy prose (“She looked at him standing onshore, and knew right then that it didn’t matter how many hearts shattered around her, she was going to marry him, and fast”) that brings a whiff of the low tide.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2003
ISBN: 0-425-18824-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
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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