A challenging but ultimately uplifting novel.
In Muro’s debut novel, a spiritual young man comes of age in unusual circumstances.
The story begins with Eddie looking back on his youth living on the grounds of a Chicago insane asylum in the 1960s. Early on, it’s clear that the teenage Eddie is spiritually gifted. Despite where he lives, where his mother works as a doctor, he forms a Bible study group with a friend since “[a] need to read scriptures burned within Eddie.” He also speaks of a “friend” within himself who helps guide him through life. His relationship with God, and with the inmates, drives the narrative. Muro creates a strange world, as readers would expect a mental hospital to be, but it’s also as real as everyday life. The patients’ back stories illustrate the corruption and injustice that drove the mental health system at the time. Some inmates are foster children with nowhere else to go, and others are political dissidents shut away on spurious charges. Muro’s novel is based largely on his own experiences growing up in an asylum, where his father worked. It’s not for the faint of heart; almost as soon as it opens, for example, Eddie witnesses a priest molesting his younger sister. Readers go on to learn that Eddie’s love interest, Patricia, was sexually abused by her father, and many other patients in the asylum have similarly gruesome pasts. However, Muro doesn’t gratuitously describe these horrors. Instead, in well-paced, readable prose, he shows how these stories contributed to Eddie’s spiritual development. In the end, Eddie manages to bring light to the afflicted patients and, ultimately, to himself, even in the midst of tragedy. Muro develops clear themes over the course of the novel, showing Eddie’s relationship to the faith in which he was raised and to the faith he later finds. As a result, the book will likely appeal to habitual readers of inspirational works.
A challenging but ultimately uplifting novel.Pub Date: March 20, 2013
ISBN: 978-1475155136
Page Count: 428
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2013
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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