by Connie May Fowler ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 11, 2005
Plot and prose overload, with shades of Alice Sebold’s Lovely Bones.
Southern novelist Fowler (Staircase of a Thousand Steps, 2001, etc.) tries for the profound and moving as she tells of a good woman and friend whose sudden death provokes big questions.
Florida-set, the story is an awkward mix of mystery, gothic ghoul, and politically correct attitudes. A cobbled patchwork of different voices includes those of a transsexual and former Marine troubled by his Vietnam experience; a doctor whose wife recently died from breast cancer; a bad-boy novelist; and the dead Murmur Lee Harp. And the tale they tell is so heavy with foreshadowing that the mystery of Murmur Lee’s death is soon apparent—despite all the purple ink (“I become an ocean tippling in the cupped petals of a morning glory,” etc.). On New Year’s Eve 2001, Murmur Lee, a divorced healer and bar-owner, joins her new lover, novelist Billy Speare, on his boat on the river. They drink and listen to music, but suddenly, when Billy puts on a new and unusual CD, Murmur Lee falls into the dark river and drowns. While Murmur Lee adjusts to being dead, her friends gather in Iris Haven, Murmur’s hometown, to mourn her: among them are the transsexual Edith Piaf, former Marine; Dr. Z, who loved both his wife Katrina and Murmur; Lucinda, a Mennonite artist who also loved Murmur but from a distance; and Charleston Rowena Mudd, a childhood friend who leaves Harvard to join the mourners in Iris Haven. Free in death to visit both past and present, Murmur discovers that she’s a product of a rape, which helps explain her father’s coolness and her mother’s religiosity; revisits her own ecstatic religious experiences, eventually diagnosed as a rare form of epilepsy; recalls how her marriage broke up when her husband couldn’t deal with their small daughter’s fatal leukemia; learns how an ancestor came to give Iris Haven its name, and watches her friends grieve—and move on.
Plot and prose overload, with shades of Alice Sebold’s Lovely Bones.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2005
ISBN: 0-385-49981-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2004
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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