Animates 1970s circus life via a sharp-eyed but unsympathetic lead.
A young woman rebels against her privileged upbringing during the summer of 1971.
Sarah Cunningham has no clear goals, just an intense restlessness and dissatisfaction with her life following her high school graduation. As a member of an upper-class suburban Boston family, she’s aware of the conventional path she could take, starting with attending college in the fall. But when her high school boyfriend takes a trip to Malaysia, she decides it’s time to seek an adventure of her own. She joins a traveling circus where she dons loose, flowing clothing, smokes pot, and soon falls for West, a 20-year-old elephant handler. She tackles different jobs in the circus and gets involved in the lives of the clowns, acrobats, and other performers. As the troupe wends its way through the South to its Florida winter quarters, Sarah experiences both the glittery and seamy sides of big-top life. She sees co-workers engage in covert criminal activity and participates in it herself to a degree. The Vietnam War intrudes; West and others dodge the draft; and Sarah witnesses rampant racism in the Southern states. At summer’s end, a crisis compels Sarah to reevaluate whether she should stay with the circus or go back to Boston. In her debut novel, Wellington vividly portrays both the traveling circus and the South in the early 1970s, and Sarah’s voice lends intimacy to these descriptions. Despite her powers of observation, Sarah is an unappealing lead. She befriends her fellow circus workers to satisfy her own need for excitement and independence without really taking responsibility for her actions. West comes across as more likable, despite his shady past and slim hopes for future.
Animates 1970s circus life via a sharp-eyed but unsympathetic lead.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4808-3468-2
Page Count: 210
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2016
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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