This slim fictional collection of letters from, to, and about a disturbed 12-year-old boy reads more like a writing-class assignment than a debut novel. At the start, Benjamin is heading to summer camp in New Hampshire, and the first section contains letters from his parents, his psychiatrist, the owners of the camp, his counselor, and a few other bits. Little of this rings true: How many summer camps would be willing to take on a child who is frequently seen ``rocking back and forth, playing intensely with the dirt, laughing when he was alone''? A child whose psychiatrist describes him as borderline autistic, clinically depressed, and often unable to function normally? Benjamin is unnaturally attached to a stuffed letter ``H,'' which he calls Elliot and with which his parents abscond after visiting him halfway through the summer. The second section consists of letters from Benjamin to Elliot and vice versa (obviously written by Benjamin). The boy's early letters make it clear that he believes there is an entire society of Elliots living in a place known as Elliottown, but additional correspondence merely repeats that idea without sufficiently expanding on it. Shepard does a good job of re-creating Benjamin's secret language (for example, these letters have a complicated dating system), but she too often hits the reader over the head with Benjamin's obsessions, such as Star Trek and pizza bagels. In fact, much of the material here is obvious, and the differences in the voices of various characters feel forced (Benjamin's counselor writes to a friend in laughable slang, addressing him as ``you studly tan animal''). A third and final section presents correspondence relating to Benjamin's stay in a mental hospital. A lot of fancy fonts and letterheads indicate the different writers (Benjamin's young sister uses a blocky mix of capital and lower-case), but the image of Benjamin himself remains vague. The impulse to utilize an innovative form is admirable, but the results are unfortunately shoddy.
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-670-85927-3
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
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
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
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