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
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 presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
PERSPECTIVES
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