A middling seafaring adventure in need of characters with more depth to make this intriguing history connect with readers.
Leaving behind a life as a printer in his father’s Amsterdam print shop, a young man embarks on a journey around the Atlantic Ocean in the early 17th century.
After accidentally starting a fire while saving a young woman from two would-be rapists, Jansen Visscher disobeys his father’s wishes and runs away, boarding The Black Tulip, a privateer ship under the direction of the Dutch West India Company. Combining Jansen and other fictional characters with real-life historical figures such as Adm. Piet Heyn, the novel provides a thoroughgoing portrait of a life at sea. The Black Tulip’s mission is to capture the Spanish treasure fleet, and no shortage of naval skirmishes accompanies them on this mission. Jansen shows himself to be educated and quarrelsome, frequently questioning Piet’s orders and acting as a sort of moral compass: challenging the institution of slavery or pushing for less severe punishment of his shipmates. Amid the nautical events, Yoder (Margaret’s Print Shop, 2005) finds the most success in charting Jansen’s questioning of his decision to leave his father; he visits the print shops on islands where his fleet stops, engages in philosophical discussion, and comes to value the knowledge his father and others in the trade represent. To be sure, Yoder errs on the historical side of historical fiction. While the research behind the novel is beyond reproach, Yoder is less adept at providing an engaging narrative encapsulated by that history. Too often the story confuses information with emotional depth—the reader knows an awful lot about these characters, but feeling their motivations is less likely. Often, clichéd passages—“He had earned his sea legs,” Yoder says of Jansen early in the book, “but the ground under his feet gave him a sense of reassurance”—stand in for what might be more engaging writing, telling readers what’s going on without inviting them to feel it alongside the characters.
A middling seafaring adventure in need of characters with more depth to make this intriguing history connect with readers.Pub Date: June 26, 2014
ISBN: 978-0990555902
Page Count: 318
Publisher: Plowshares Publications
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2014
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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