by Dianne Warren ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 16, 2016
Fine, sensitive fiction, though the author’s rigorously restrained approach won’t be to everyone’s taste.
A woman finally confronts the past she has blotted out for more than 20 years in Warren’s follow-up to her Governor General’s Award–winning debut (Juliet in August, 2012).
On holiday in Ireland, Frances Moon blurts out to her longtime partner, Ian, that she had a stillborn child when she was 19 and, by the way, never divorced the husband who wasn’t the father of her baby. Back in Toronto, Frances quits her job and heads for Elliot, the small town in western Canada where she grew up. She is devastated Ian might not be waiting when she gets back, but she has done nothing to counter his accusation that “you are a person who resists happiness.” We begin to discern the reasons for this in Chapter 2, which rolls back to the early 1960s to show 5-year-old Frances wondering if her restless, dissatisfied mother has taken off for good while her father weeps at night. Mom does return, making it her mission to ensure that her daughter goes to university and escapes her fate as a farmer’s wife. As Warren traces Frances’ loss-haunted childhood and adolescence—three significant adults in her life die unexpectedly—the present-tense narration underscores that none of these issues have been resolved. It’s painful to watch Frances sabotaging herself: refusing to apply for a scholarship; marrying a much-older man simply because it gives her aimless life some direction; then abruptly changing course when the magnitude of her mistake dawns on her. Warren’s reluctance to delve into her characters’ motivations gives the novel a rather distanced feel for quite a while, though it’s highly readable throughout. Then, just as young-adult Frances “step[s] from the ruins of a life that didn’t happen,” the startling interpolation of the town scapegrace’s back story points us in the direction of a tentative emotional reckoning for Frances as well. The understated yet touching closing pages suggest Frances has achieved some degree of contentment.
Fine, sensitive fiction, though the author’s rigorously restrained approach won’t be to everyone’s taste.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-399-15801-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Marian Wood/Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
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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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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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