A diffident but ultimately entertaining exploration of a famous literary lacuna.
A debut historical novel fills a mysterious three-year gap in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.
As a young, Roma-looking orphan, Heathcliff is adopted by Old Earnshaw and taken to live with his family at their estate, Wuthering Heights. In this first section, Drum closely follows Brontë’s description of events: Heathcliff becomes nearly inseparable from Old Earnshaw’s daughter, Catherine, but is abused and eventually forced into a servant’s role by his son, Hindley. Years pass, and one night Heathcliff overhears Cathy claiming that it would “degrade” her to marry him; distraught, he flees the estate and vows that he’ll make himself into a rich gentleman worthy of the woman he loves. From there, the book imagines what might have occurred over the next three years, which remain curiously unexplored in the classic novel. The author offers the possibility that Heathcliff finds work as a sailor in the Atlantic triangle trade, voyaging from the western coast of Africa to Jamaica and back to England. Along the way, Heathcliff experiences the rough conditions of a life at sea, the allures and hazards of exotic cultures, and the horrors of the slave trade. He witnesses the greed and malice of powerful men and stays true to his own values as a consequence. But upon his return to England, he preoccupies himself with exterior matters, hoping to transform into a fashionable society man. It’s a credit to the author that direct lines and scenes from Wuthering Heights fit seamlessly into the overall narrative. Each locale is vibrantly rendered, from the ship’s tight quarters to the sprawl and seduction of Victorian London. Heathcliff himself appears somewhat less vivid, partly due to the tale’s detached tone and its focus on adventure over interiority. In some ways, the book openly depicts brutality, as in an effective scene where slaves are branded. But it also shies away from hints of Heathcliff’s personal cruelty, instead envisioning him as blandly compassionate, naïve, and heroic. As a result, 19th- and 21st-century framings coexist in ways both successful and distracting.
A diffident but ultimately entertaining exploration of a famous literary lacuna.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9911857-7-1
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Burning Books Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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