JAG fans and courtroom-drama enthusiasts will find enough of interest.
In Stone’s novel, World War I–era English poet Rupert Brooke has a startling influence on four students at the Navy Officer Candidate School in Newport, R.I.
At Navy OCS, James Drayton, an admiral’s son, forms a secret society, the Great Lovers, named after one of Brooke’s better-known poems. Drayton intends to reform the Navy, doing away with the elements he most despises at school, including hazing and cheating, though it isn’t clear why he chooses the other members, except for Tate, his roommate; the others seem unexceptional. They leave school after being posted to their respective areas of service, only to be brought back together when Drayton, an intelligence officer on an aircraft carrier dispatched near Taiwan to protect the integrity of an election, dies under mysterious circumstances—an explosion on the aircraft carrier killed five people. After the identities of the other Great Lovers are revealed, the four are court martialed as part of Drayton’s apparent mutiny; secret societies are forbidden in the Navy, and someone needs to be blamed for the tragedy. Defended by attorney Raoul Thomas, himself the subject of a court martial in his youth, the remaining Great Lovers are in a fight for their professional lives. Stone, also a graduate of Navy OCS, has an interesting story to tell, though the inclusion of naval terminology could have been handled less awkwardly. It’s a shame, too, that more of Brooke’s poetry isn’t included, other than a few bits of his biography offered by Drayton. Readers may wonder why the poet left such a big impression on the Great Lovers. While Drayton and his roommate are well-crafted characters, the two women are difficult to distinguish. Meanwhile, the book is something of a tribute to the end of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” and Drayton’s attraction to heterosexual Tate is handled with sensitivity. However, the courtroom scenes are the book’s strong suit, although the surprise ending is weak. There are few dramatic twists or revelations, and readers never really learn exactly what was on Drayton’s mind when he died. His disappearance from the second half of the book, except as a discussion point, weakens the narrative power.
JAG fans and courtroom-drama enthusiasts will find enough of interest.Pub Date: April 12, 2012
ISBN: 978-0985493912
Page Count: 104
Publisher: Fry Pots Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2012
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 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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