This thought-provoking tale makes a strong argument for letting go of past pain.
A novel examines the impact of a father’s suicide on his son.
Jimmy Lansford had a hard childhood in rural Oklahoma, but he seems to have come out well. He has a well-paying job and he and his wife, Jill, and their children, Jonathan and Jessica, live in an upper-class neighborhood near Phoenix. Yet Jimmy is a haunted man, scarred by his past. His father, Ronnie, killed himself when Jimmy was 15 years old and his sister, Kelly, was 12. They were left living with their meth addict mother until Jimmy escaped to college. It’s slowly revealed that Kelly wasn’t as lucky. Strange things start to happen to Jimmy when Jessica is about to turn 12. First, on a business trip, he spies someone in his room through a window, but there’s no trace of anyone there when he races back. Then, at Jessica’s birthday party, he senses a presence with him in his bathroom. Jimmy reaches his breaking point when he finds muddy, inexplicable footprints in his bedroom. This leads the former cross-country star to sneak out his bedroom window and nearly run himself to death, ending up hospitalized with dehydration. Jimmy thinks he’s possessed. Those around him want to chalk up his behavior to survivor’s guilt. The truth lies somewhere in between. McKissen (The Civil War at Home, 2018) paints a well-conceived portrait of a troubled man, utilizing Jimmy’s journey through life. The author cleverly alternates between the present and Jimmy’s formative years, slowly unreeling the protagonist’s past so that readers can understand why such a good man is struggling despite his circumstances. Kelly hangs over the entire tale, as Jimmy blames himself for her tragic fate, thinking his departure ultimately doomed her. His intriguing backstory is a tale of missed opportunities. Things would have been different if Jimmy had been willing to reach out more fervently to Mike Carlisle, the cop who had taken an interest in the Lansford siblings after Ronnie’s suicide. The effective ending involves Jimmy's informing his family about the hurt he’s carried all these years.
This thought-provoking tale makes a strong argument for letting go of past pain.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-68433-364-6
Page Count: 152
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 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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