One of the best novelists at work today, White spins an entangling—and thoroughly entertaining—yarn.
Top-flight novelist White (City Boy, 2009, etc.) returns with a bittersweet story of the love that dared not speak its name until about the winter of 1963.
The chronology is a little fuzzy, but the author situates the opening of his latest novel safely in the cozy prep-school world of the late 1950s. Jack Holmes is a glorious son of a Rust Belt then brilliantly agleam, tall and blonde and “with stomach muscles as hard as a turtle’s shell,” popular with everyone. It would be easy for him to coast, to live a superficial life, but Jack is a person of depth and complexity. So we learn when, after college, our Gatsby makes his way east and pitches his tent among the bohemians of Greenwich Village. His intelligence soon land him on the staff of a high-culture magazine where, “over-caffeinated, overdressed, and under-instructed,” he wrangles with an editor who’s smarter than Susan Sontag and more frustrated than Portnoy. At the same time, he enjoys an increasingly catholic diet of friends and bedmates, including, eventually, a promising young novelist named Will Wright—the name is suggestive—who emerges, over the chapters and decades, as Jack’s soul mate. This is not all to the good, for White’s story takes in not just the time of innocence and Camelot, but also the very first inklings of the “gay plague” that was first known as GRID, later as AIDS; Will’s final dedication to Jack reads, “Our libertine days are over.” So they are. White’s book embraces a classic love story, but it is much more: It offers something of a cultural history of gay life in New York in the closeted era before Stonewall. In the sometimes facetious, sometimes mutually uncomprehending, sometimes blazingly intelligent interplay of people of all sorts of orientations, gay and straight and in between, and all sorts of backgrounds and nationalities, White’s narrative is sometimes reminiscent of Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin stories—which is no small praise. But White’s chief characters are all-American types, which one supposes is the point: Though Jack’s psychiatrist may scold him for “acting out,” and though they were subject to criminal prosecution in their day, his desires and passions are utterly normal. White’s writing, of course, is not.
One of the best novelists at work today, White spins an entangling—and thoroughly entertaining—yarn.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-60819-703-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2012
IN THE NEWS
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.
An ambitious scientific experiment wreaks horrendous toll in the Booker-winning British author’s disturbingly eloquent sixth novel (after When We Were Orphans, 2000).
Ishiguro’s narrator, identified only as Kath(y) H., speaks to us as a 31-year-old social worker of sorts, who’s completing her tenure as a “carer,” prior to becoming herself one of the “donors” whom she visits at various “recovery centers.” The setting is “England, late 1990s”—more than two decades after Kath was raised at a rural private school (Hailsham) whose students, all children of unspecified parentage, were sheltered, encouraged to develop their intellectual and especially artistic capabilities, and groomed to become donors. Visions of Brave New World and 1984 arise as Kath recalls in gradually and increasingly harrowing detail her friendships with fellow students Ruth and Tommy (the latter a sweet, though distractible boy prone to irrational temper tantrums), their “graduation” from Hailsham and years of comparative independence at a remote halfway house (the Cottages), the painful outcome of Ruth’s breakup with Tommy (whom Kath also loves), and the discovery the adult Kath and Tommy make when (while seeking a “deferral” from carer or donor status) they seek out Hailsham’s chastened “guardians” and receive confirmation of the limits long since placed on them. With perfect pacing and infinite subtlety, Ishiguro reveals exactly as much as we need to know about how efforts to regulate the future through genetic engineering create, control, then emotionlessly destroy very real, very human lives—without ever showing us the faces of the culpable, who have “tried to convince themselves. . . . That you were less than human, so it didn’t matter.” That this stunningly brilliant fiction echoes Caryl Churchill’s superb play A Number and Margaret Atwood’s celebrated dystopian novels in no way diminishes its originality and power.
A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.Pub Date: April 11, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4339-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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PERSPECTIVES
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