A first novel that pretentiously tries to address some of the big questions of the 1960s by revisiting the period at a dizzying clip with a pastiche for a protagonist. As one character suggests, ``The sixties are about being reasonably weird . . . but a strange time is getting stranger,'' and this evolving strange time is experienced here by midwestern college student Dewitt Berkhoff. Dewitt is expected not only to bear witness to the times, but to learn how to fight for peace without resorting to violence. Each chapter of the novel, which begins in 1967 and ends in 1970 at Kent State, is prefaced with period headlines—``Coltrane Blows Final Note''; ``Che Guevara Killed By Bolivian Troops''—that are neat reminders of what was going on then, jogging the memory, but not really explicating Hetzner's theme. The dilemma implicit in this theme troubles Dewitt as he moves from being a member of a peaceful campus antiwar group that organizes demonstrations and marches on the Pentagon to becoming an unwitting participant in a bombing that kills two innocent people. The problem is that Dewitt, who seems to have been immaculately conceived for the story—his family, except for one Christmas card, remains offstage—is your average nice guy, overloaded here with heavy responsibilities that he's just not interesting or intelligent enough to handle. So his journey- -including his time in the movement, his attendance at the 1968 Democratic Convention, his relationships with various other hippies, his encounter with a wise Native American, and the death of a girlfriend at Kent State, with lots of drugs and sex tossed in along the way—only increases his moral confusion and adds nothing to our own understanding of the times. Drive-by history, rather than the long difficult march to the heart of the matter.
Pub Date: March 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-55921-184-9
Page Count: 344
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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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