Mixing the lighthearted with the dire, this family story makes for a brief though nuanced look at the human condition.
A debut novella presents the angel Gabriel’s memoir.
As Gabriel explains at the beginning of his story, he has been sent to Earth by God to “inform humankind as a herald.” And though his most famous task involves “the news of Christ’s imminent coming to Earth,” this tale focuses on speaking with a family in Pennsylvania. Gabriel comes to Earth in 2015 in the form of a teenage girl named Debbie. She has been hired as an extra pair of hands at Jonathan Hanson’s fifth birthday party in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Everything is fine until Jon’s sister disappears. She is later discovered dead; she managed to suffocate while playing among some construction materials. What is an angel to do? Following a discussion with God in heaven, Gabriel returns to Earth, this time as a 78-year-old man named Dave Kryzinsky. His goal is to insert himself into Jon’s life. From there, he fulfills his mission as Jon’s guardian, seeking to further understand humanity’s plight. Of course getting to know a grieving boy and his family, especially in the form of an aged and apparently penniless stranger, is no easy task. Depicting a playful and at times cantankerous Gabriel (don’t even bother to try to get him to eat turkey on Thanksgiving), Miles’ story is a mixture of the fun and the serious. A young girl dies after all and it is hardly the only tragedy that will strike her family. Nevertheless, God is in control and it is a fact even Gabriel must learn to comprehend despite the pain he sees around him. Although aspects of the angel’s personality can be a little too cute (he does like his pastries), he ultimately becomes a memorable figure. While Gabriel’s human feelings are not so wild as to get him into too much trouble (he certainly doesn’t lust after anyone as either Debbie or Dave), his character provides insight into the difficulties and failings of mortals.
Mixing the lighthearted with the dire, this family story makes for a brief though nuanced look at the human condition.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5470-6818-0
Page Count: -
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 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
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