A grim, moving thriller from the prolific Poyer (The Only Thing to Fear, 1995, etc.), who here returns to the aptly named Hemlock County. Hemlock, in a forgotten corner of Pennsylvania, is sinking back into wilderness after a century of rapacious exploitation. The coal, oil, and gas deposits that once fueled the economy are gone, leaving poisoned landscapes and a dwindling, embittered population. Among them is W.T. ``Racks'' Halvorsen, a legendary hunter. In Poyer's earlier Hemlock County novel, Winter in the Heart (1993), the elderly Halvorsen figured as one of a group who turned to violence to stop a local businessman from illegally dumping quantities of toxic waste in the county. This time out, Halvorsen is on his own as he deals with an equally lethal conspiracy. Walking in the woods, he comes upon two men methodically beating a third to death. They flee with the body, but Halvorsen, angered by what he has seen, looking for anything that will dissolve some of the grief he still feels for his wife's death three years ago, tries to track them down. His search leads him into the heart of a supposedly uninhabited wilderness area, where he finds a kidnapped girl and an ambitious plot to steal quantities of natural gas. Rescuing the girl, he flees deeper into the wilderness to elude the killers. Poyer hits his stride with Halvorsen's ingenious and convincing use of wilderness skills to outwit his pursuers in a long midwinter duel that's tense, vivid, and believable. Both Halvorsen and the resilient girl he has rescued are complex, convincing figures. And the outcome is satisfying without seeming either forced or melodramatic. A subtle, highly original blend of eco-thriller and novel of character. Halvorsen, bitter, almost overcome by age and regret, very much a man of an earlier time, lingers in the mind.
Pub Date: April 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-85601-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1996
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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