Lots of nicely rendered, physically specific details about farming, fishing, and hunting in the first third of the 20th...
Lyrical first novel, enraptured by nature and language, traces the fortunes of three unusual women and the men who love them from the summer of 1913 to the hurricane of 1938.
Elizabeth Gonne Low, 65 when the story begins, is a wealthy outsider in the coastal town of Westport, Massachusetts, though she lives there year-round. So does Maggie, a 16-year-old immigrant from Latin America who tends to Elizabeth, beds down with a local merchant, and seems to know everything about animals and plants. Elizabeth’s granddaughter Eve comes for the summers, beginning in 1917 when the seven-year-old arrives with her father, grief-stricken after his wife’s mysterious death. Eve found her mother’s body, and she’s retreated into a hazy disconnect that entices Jake Wilkes, a local boy who “grows displaced from his own life” through reading the books in Elizabeth’s library. Jake’s older brother, Wes, solidly rooted in the town’s old ways, becomes a rum-runner and engages in a fierce, disastrous affair with Maggie. Eve feels Jake’s attraction (“somehow he had unwrapped her, and now she could not find her way back to being closed”), but she settles for Patrick Gerow, an architect designing fancy new houses for the summer people. Elizabeth’s thoughts turn increasingly toward death, Maggie nurses the shattered Wes, and Eve yearns for Jake as the narrative meanders toward the famous hurricane that devastated New England on September 21, 1938. The storm blows some energy into Tripp’s languid narrative, though even in this apocalyptic climax the prose tends to be overwrought, as are the plot developments. Tripp writes lovely sentences, but she’s so enamored by the sound of her authorial voice that the characters remain artful constructs without convincing lives of their own.
Lots of nicely rendered, physically specific details about farming, fishing, and hunting in the first third of the 20th century, but too many of the central insights are as solemn and obvious as the moon imagery that gives the book its title.Pub Date: July 15, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-50844-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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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