An intelligent and bracingly honest look at the possibility of a post-racial America.
A debut political novel explores the cultural ramifications of the first black U.S. president.
Al Carpenter, about to graduate from Harvard Law School, confronts a potentially life-altering decision: he can accept a position waiting for him at the firm Sullivan & Katz or join the campaign to elect African-American attorney Ron Johnson to the U.S. Senate. Al commits to working for Johnson, but the candidate’s a political neophyte, and his prospects for success are considered slim even among his admirers. It’s not clear that he can get the Democrat Party machine’s backing, and he’ll be perpetually light on funds without the support of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Johnson also desperately needs endorsements from a startup company—North Carolina Sustainable Energy Partners—and veteran political Congressman Branford Darling, who is reluctant to alienate his own constituents in an election year by backing a black candidate. As a matter of implausible coincidence, Darling’s first congressional campaign was generously funded by a racist billionaire, whose son is the CEO of NCSEP. Al audaciously decides to use this information to bully a quick and badly needed endorsement from Darling, who is influential but politically vulnerable. The plot is situated within the historical horizon of President Barack Obama’s momentous election victory, which is treated as both a triumph and a bellwether of future racial progress. Al, warily optimistic, tends to view Johnson’s success or failure as a test of America’s openness to electing other black leaders: “The true value of Obama’s election—and we can unlock it right now—is the potential it has to drive momentum for progress going forward.” In his astute tale, Mitchell knowledgeably captures not only the internecine conflict that occurs within a party, but also the volatile mix of excitement and skepticism that followed Obama’s election victory. In addition, while this novel is driven more by political ideas than concrete characters, Al’s romantic aspirations and failures give his persona some depth (he regularly looks at a framed picture of Martin van Buren, “hoping that something of his talent for king-making might rub off on me”). This is a cerebral work of fiction largely driven by sharply composed dialogue—though it occasionally turns didactic and preachy—and is clearly meant to provocatively instigate political discussion. It succeeds at this, and even a bit more.
An intelligent and bracingly honest look at the possibility of a post-racial America.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-692-72013-4
Page Count: -
Publisher: Project Z Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
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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