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SCHOOL FOR THE BLIND

The self-destructive family and the complicated love between siblings, core elements of McFarland's acclaimed 1990 debut The Music Room, reappear in a bold new configuration in this second novel about an elderly, emotionally unfulfilled brother and sister. News photographer and world traveler Francis Brimm has retired to his hometown of Pines, Florida; living nearby in the family home, her lifelong residence, is his older sister, 78-year-old Muriel. Their tranquillity is shattered when Francis discovers the remains of two murder victims, female college students; both Brimms receive threatening phone calls. But if the present is treacherous, so is the past. Her brother's return has revived Muriel's memories of an often grim childhood dominated by their father, an embittered doctor, a drunk, and a suicide. Muriel's defense has been religious belief, her brother's a skeptical detachment; neither has ever fully trusted others; ladies' man Francis has always shied away from commitments. McFarland's depiction of these old people navigating between visions, fantasy, and reality, fearful of appearing senile, glows with truthfulness. His handling of their fates is more problematic. A leisurely narrator, he suddenly, disconcertingly, becomes all business. Muriel, devastated by a childhood memory, succumbs to a fever, while Francis contracts a fatal blood disease; both are cocooned in fever-dreams. Their eleventh-hour savior is Deidre, young, unmarried, pregnant, and on the edge, Muriel's part-time help turned live-in housekeeper. Before Francis dies, all three savor the first-time experience of secure family love, of being thrillingly in touch, an apt sensation for the ``blind.'' It's a moving, dramatic conjunction, even if pushed a little too hard. Seldom has the combination in old people of spiritual authority, physical frailty, and sheer dottiness been caught with more acuity. McFarland's novel is full of airy meditations on mortality, but it is his robust characterizations that make it so heart-warming, such an impressive conquest of new territory. (Book- of-the-Month Club selection)

Pub Date: May 1, 1994

ISBN: 0-395-64497-6

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1994

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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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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

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

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

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