``I seized what is nowadays made to seem / nearly nothing,'' Macklin writes. If she means by ``nearly nothing,'' poetry...
``Half the house here belongs to me. Half belongs to sound.'' Thus beautifully begins Macklin's second collection of poems, a reflection on loss and memory. ``In the taste / of the sour apple / is the bee''—and therein the history of everything required to bring us the apple. But our timing is off—the apple is unripe. Similarly, when we speak with intended clarity, we fail. Even in poems, which Macklin compares with mazes, ``just when you think you're getting close / to the center, you're moved away.'' At times Macklin pauses before her subject; at other times she maneuvers as if imagining lives while gazing at paintings—lives once removed, as it were. Memory, she seems to be saying, works exactly this way. Yet her poems seem risen from experience and from the awareness that what we lose remains in us, if skewed. The titles of the book's three sections (“Grammars of Attention,” “The Editorial We,” and “Persons Plural”) assert Macklin's preoccupation with the confusions of language. She contends that ``stories alone'' cannot reveal the truth without attention to (grammatical) rules we too often complain against. The way things are said is vital, but we frequently misspeak or misunderstand—and yet we construct our lives in response to such inaccuracies. How unfortunate that even thought depends on the undependable language in which it is threaded! ``Here is the sound I've missed,'' Macklin announces in one poem, knowing the reader can never hear it. And yet her poems aspire to help us accomplish exactly that.
``I seized what is nowadays made to seem / nearly nothing,'' Macklin writes. If she means by ``nearly nothing,'' poetry itself, we can be glad she did.Pub Date: April 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-393-04867-5
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2000
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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