Disarmingly simple, despite its hairpin twists and buried secrets: Spencer manages to convey the real wonder of discovering...
A meticulously crafted coming-of-age tale by recent college graduate Spencer.
Tom Banner, at twentysomething, is so innocent that he almost begs to be taken advantage of. A dock manager at a Baltimore shipping firm, he dutifully swallows any indignity that his cretinous boss Steve sends his way, whether it’s sitting through the same corporate orientation film with each new batch of employees or scouring out the staff kitchen to save the cost of cleaners. How is he rewarded? With dismissal, once Steve discovers that Tom never repaid the $80 he never even knew had accidentally been added to his paycheck. Steve even threatens to charge Tom with theft, and the innocent lad panics and skips town. He hides out in Ocean City, Maryland, with Leah Greene, the niece of a Baltimore friend, and waits for his friend and co-worker Conrad Begg to call when the coast is clear at home. Leah works in a bar and is obviously unhappy and lonely. She seems attracted to Tom, but there’s something so odd and distant about her that Tom tries to discourage her—and her uncle Fritz, who is determined to set the pair up for some reason neither Tom nor Leah can understand. Tom takes odd jobs, then finds something more permanent when Fritz’s friend Joe mistakes Tom for someone named Pete and hires him to work on his fishing boat. Tom isn’t a natural-born fisherman, but he hits it off with Joe, who offers him a salary and place to live if he stays on. Tom’s tempted but wants to get back to his old life in Baltimore. Or does he? By now he and Leah have fallen in love—but Tom still has to learn what Dark Secret she’s keeping from him.
Disarmingly simple, despite its hairpin twists and buried secrets: Spencer manages to convey the real wonder of discovering life for the first time.Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-880909-65-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2003
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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