A dense, tedious novel about combustive family issues.
Dröge’s (The Consortium, 2016, etc.) novel explores the fraught relationship between a Dutch businessman and his artist daughter.
A series of bizarre occurrences, including a high-profile art burglary, have brought Henk van Wijnen-Swarttouw’s shipyard business empire, centered in the massive port of Rotterdam, the Netherlands, teetering at the edge of collapse. He becomes distracted from these troubles, however, when he walks past the art gallery he owns and sees a painting of his naked teenage daughter hanging in the window. Julia is 18, recently graduated from high school, and taking a sabbatical year before beginning her medical studies—or so Henk hopes. During this time, he’s lent Julia the use of the gallery, but it seems that her foray into the art world is starting to snowball into a form of protest. She’s interested in environmental issues and wants her father to renounce his capitalistic practices and transform his company into a paragon of sustainability. Henk, on the other hand, becomes obsessed with knowing everything he can about his daughter’s life. Soon, Henk is seeing a psychiatrist, and he and Julia are forced to negotiate the future of their relationship—as well as the future of their Rotterdam community. That city is central to Dröge’s novel, which effectively employs a number of the city’s characters to illustrate its interconnected nature. The plot is hampered by the author’s dense prose, though, which is overwritten and given to awkward syntax: “Cor Figee crossed, while understanding as well as embarrassed he let down his hand and forced his head away from the car, in which Henk was searching for the right information on the dashboard.” Shifts between different characters’ points of view, as well as between first and third person, occur with little warning and jostle readers out of the story. Dröge does make an admirable attempt to grapple with worthy themes—environmental degradation, familial tensions, the nature of art. But his plot is less than compelling, and the reading experience ends up being something of a slog.
A dense, tedious novel about combustive family issues.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5190-8808-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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