This finely written sequel to McCaig's popular Nop's Trials (1984) follows Penny Burkeholder and her unique Border Collie, Nop's offering, Hope. Fans of Nop will find him again, this time growing old with wisdom. McCaig takes us into the beautifully realized psyche of Penny as she comes to terms with a deep tragedy. After Penny's husband and daughter are killed in a truck accident, she leaves her rural home and takes to the road. Her parents, Beverly and Lewis, are left behind and hurt. Throughout, McCaig's descriptions are starkly evocative: ``The tamales were good but they were greasy and Penny was dabbing her lips with a paper napkin when they drove into the barnyard; there wasn't much to it; barn, corral, couple pickups, gas tank, tiny trailer and a cowboy chasing a sheep and never catching it.'' Ironically, Hope is never as fully realized a character as McCaig's humans, though he does provide comfort and inspiration for Penny, sometimes in the form of spoken words. Somehow, Hope's talking is convincing and never seems like a gimmick. When Penny throws in her lot with Ransome Barlow, ``a gangly fellow...skin tanned so dark it was sun dried,'' she starts to imagine Hope a winner in the sheepdog trials. Soon he begins winning. Ransome is in love with Penny, but it takes her a while to realize his devotion. Only when Hope rebels and will no longer perform as a winner is Penny able to grieve for her daughter and husband; only then can she give up the road to find her way back to human connections. McCaig is a marvelous writer. His landscapes, whether of the Mississippi Delta, the truck stops along the highway, the life of the American West, or the human heart, are vivid and true.
Pub Date: May 11, 1994
ISBN: 0-517-58488-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1994
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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