A diverse collections of stories about dealing with the past.
The past is a lingering, powerful specter for the characters in Dan Burns' (Recalled to Life, 2013, etc.) motley collection of short stories.
A former mayor tries to outrun a scandal [4], a spy reunites with a childhood friend [82], and an abuse victim struggles to outrun bad memories and the consequences of his own transgressions [100]: these are the kinds of characters who permeate No Turning Back, where the present is shaped by the past and the past is all but inescapable. The stories range from action film-like scenes between a former president and an Iranian leader [111] to a memorable fantasy in which author Ray Bradbury arrives for a surprise birthday dinner [183]. Burns' characters are haunted—by death and loss [37], past scandals [4], and often by their own mistakes [101]. The characters' pasts are well-developed for such short stories, but they have an unfortunate tendency to get weighed down in explaining their own backstories instead of depicting the action of the present. The result is that readers are sometimes left wading through tedious descriptions of the past, but there's no doubt that these long interpolations manage to emphasize the book's message: our pasts shape our present states in complex ways, and unless we can let go, they shape our futures, too. Each story is followed by a brief essay explaining the author's writing process and his thoughts about the story. The author also includes an eight-page introduction, meaning that these stories arrive wrapped in a hefty padding of context and explanation. More intellectual readers will enjoy this, while others may prefer to skip ahead to the stories, which have a variety of intriguing plots that will entice readers' interest even when the pace of the stories occasionally lags.
A diverse collections of stories about dealing with the past.Pub Date: April 29, 2014
ISBN: 978-0991169405
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Chicago Arts Press
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2014
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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