An economically written novel that packs a punch about a young immigrant soldiering on through life’s hardships.
A Cuban youth flees to the U.S. with his family after Fidel Castro’s revolution and builds a hard shell of stoic strength as he grows up.
In this debut fictional memoir, Prol details the early life of F.P. Romero, who, an imaginary editor notes, died of an aneurysm at age 60. Born in Havana in 1954 to a well-off family, Romero sees his fortunes decline after Castro comes to power and his father is arrested. Permitted to leave the country in 1961, the family arrives in Miami with assets of $5. They learn English by listening to Berlitz LPs and watching American television shows. As “smiling chameleons,” they adapt to American life to various degrees. Romero’s father—“the monarch in exile”—lands a teaching job in Baltimore and sends Romero and his brother to military school there. Romero’s mother, an attorney in Cuba, struggles to accept her new homemaker status in the U.S. and is stricken with breast cancer. After the family makes a trip back to Miami to show off its success, she dies a painful death. Romero spirals downward, hanging out with “greasers” and hooligans in junior high school and beyond. There’s teenage car racing, fighting, and getting high sniffing rug cleaner from a bag. A few chapters of violence, cruelty, and crime have been lost, the editor notes, but the story resumes with Romero drifting through early adulthood with a music band, ending on a happy note when he moves into a plush apartment with his girlfriend. He’s developed a protective coat of armor from life’s struggles, “like the hardening of a tortoise’s shell as it ages.” Prol has written an evocative, modern immigrant coming-of-age tale that’s subtle and finely drawn. Gentle, fish-out-of-water humor, such as Romero’s father handing out canned Spam and veggies to trick-or-treaters on Halloween, balances nicely with poignant moments (Romero listening to his mother’s “moans and cries of pain” as she slowly dies of cancer). Prol gets his stoic philosophy across unobtrusively along with keen observations of human nature—“most of us are walking contradictions,” he asserts. His prose can be sad, funny, ironic, and even lyrical, as when describing the young Romero’s love of nature in Maryland. The chapters are interspersed with surprisingly good poems that tend to the mellow and melancholic.
An economically written novel that packs a punch about a young immigrant soldiering on through life’s hardships.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62787-163-1
Page Count: 172
Publisher: Wheatmark
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
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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