One scene comes needlessly close to Bull Durham (the town beauty becomes a serial dater of transient ballplayers), and...
The town that baseball built has some mean secrets that throw a wrench into a handful of lives in Us Weekly editor Pilek’s atmospheric and character-filled debut.
Cooperstown is a place so redolent of America that it has taken on the stature of myth. But there are skeletons in its closets, and Pilek pries them out into the light of day to atone for their sins. The ghosts threaten the town’s very foundation: without baseball, the quaint, kempt town would be just another hardscrabble upstate municipality. Without the glory of the baseball’s immaculate conception on its soil, no one would visit. Pilek never gets ponderous with all this, but, instead, she plays it like background music to the residents who live the myth. Forget about the economics; it’s those who identify with the story of the sport’s origins who will pay the price for having stumbled upon closets with ghosts. One will die of a heart attack, another will hang himself, a third will go mute and mad, another turn to booze, a fifth lose everything and go live in the woods. Still, Pilek is not here to play the wasp with a sting. These episodes have already been played out before the story takes root, and Pilek’s tale is in their being put to right, offering a touch of redemption—of the people, not the sport—and taking a peek at why some things endure and others fall by the wayside. Certainly, the good doesn’t always endure. Promising marriages fail, decent lives are quashed, the myth continues to devour even as it sustains. Perhaps it’s time for the myth to move on.
One scene comes needlessly close to Bull Durham (the town beauty becomes a serial dater of transient ballplayers), and another to Shoeless Joe (a dead father appears from on high), but, otherwise, Pilek offers a choice piece of baseballiana.Pub Date: July 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-6694-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
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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