A thoughtful exploration of racism and the multifaceted characters are the biggest draws in this rigorous family melodrama.
In Power’s drama (Being White: A Memoir, 2012), a black woman starts a relationship with a rich white man, who may help her and her family have a better life.
Linda Alger, working as a nursing home orderly, hopes to earn a nursing degree so that she and her 7-year-old son, Vardaman, can move out of the projects. But a chance encounter with the wealthy Alexander Aspen, the son of one of the patients, ignites romance—and the possibility of a new place to live. Their relationship, however, is far from easy. It’s complicated by people’s perceptions of them; two thugs set on getting some of Alexander’s money; and the looming trial of Donnyell, a neighbor wrongly accused of pushing Vardaman down an elevator shaft. The novel subtly examines racism. Prejudice is less overt than in the 1950s and ’60s but still there in the story’s 1989 setting; e.g., Linda’s cruel supervisor complains to a nurse about disciplining “them,” clearly referring to African-Americans. Linda and Alexander share compelling similarities (both are lost souls) as well as differences: Linda evidently thinks that money will solve everything, like getting Vardaman into an expensive school, while Alexander strives for a “simpler life.” Taken as a whole, the plot is clear-cut and unassailable: One event—Vardaman letting authorities believe that Donnyell is responsible for his elevator accident—powerfully affects the lives of those around the little boy. But it’s difficult not to see two distinct stories, one from Vardaman’s point of view and the other a contemporary spin on Romeo and Juliet. Both Linda and Alexander often come across as unsympathetic or disengaged. He’s nonresponsive about his apparent debt; she’s prone to expressing anger with a plate of hot spaghetti, but it’s a gloriously complex relationship that readers will find impossible to pass over.
A thoughtful exploration of racism and the multifaceted characters are the biggest draws in this rigorous family melodrama.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2013
ISBN: 978-1491820520
Page Count: 324
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2013
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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