Trafzer (Native American Studies/Univ. of California/Riverside) compiles an unusually interesting mix: 30 stories (and novel excerpts)—most never before published and many by unknowns—that range from amateurish to extremely literary, historical to futuristic. As for big names: M. Scott Momaday is represented by a previously uncollected story; Louise Erdrich, Michael Dorris, Leslie Marmon Silko, James Welch by novel excerpts (Welch's, unfortunately, so poorly chosen as to seem a book condensation parody); while Gerald Vizenor, Joseph Bruchac, and Paula Gunn Allen look to tradition and myth. At the same time, new work includes a top-notch story from Sherman Alexie (in a world where ``making fry bread and helping people die are the last two things Indians are good at,'' a cancer patient drives his wife away by making jokes about his terminal condition); Duane Niatum is poetic and intense about an adulterous Indian-Jewish affair; Diane Glancy is at her difficult poetic best; LeAnne Howe goes vividly back to an 18th- century Choctaw burial ceremony; Gordon Henry writes of a man robbed of his mother tongue for whom arson becomes protest and performance art and who eventually finds a language in haiku. Some less successful stories are interesting in putting Indian protagonists in situations familiar to non-Indian counterparts (a young woman doesn't want to resemble her mother; a 50-year-old yearns for adventure, then recognizes the value of her marriage; a woman remembers child sexual abuse). Stylistic and structural traits emerge: ironic linguistic playfulness with the ``enemy's'' (English) language; storytelling that resists exclusive focus on the individual, preferring multiple shifts and viewpoints to emphasize the community. An uneven collection, but valuable nonetheless for its range of Native American sensibilities—some deeply rooted in tradition, some very much in the American mainstream.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-385-46959-4
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
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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