While this book could be more concise, the protagonist’s story of rebuilding his life in the South remains appealing.
A New York office worker’s chance encounter with a mysterious woman on a train upends his life in this debut novel.
Gary Norton works for L&S Import Export Company in Manhattan and commutes home to Connecticut every day on the 5:01 p.m. train. His boring work routine and dull commute are enlivened slightly by an enigmatic woman he spies on the train. Trying to chat her up, he strikes out as she initially rebuffs him, but after several days of seeing her, they go out for drinks. It becomes clear to Gary that this woman, Julie, and her associate at a bar are mixed up in the drug trade. One evening, the police arrive at the train station and arrest her. Dismayed, Gary thinks instead of a co-worker, Susan, who has shown some interest in him. After a few dates, there seem to be some possibilities for the two romantically, but Gary encounters the police on the way home one day, and they arrest him. The police have video of him carrying Julie’s bag, and he is pressured into pleading guilty to drug possession. Freed, Gary loses his job and leaves town, heading south, seeking a new life. At a restaurant in North Carolina, he meets the owner, Sarah Dorsey, a matronly widow, whose down-home charm and kitchen-sink realism are magnetic enough to keep Gary in town. He begins cooking for the restaurant, torn between whether he is starting a new life in North Carolina or just spending time on his own before reuniting with Susan in Brooklyn. As people begin to get their hooks into Gary in the South, drama near and far threatens his plans to reshape his future. The novel has plenty of entertaining storytelling on display, and this tale of an unassuming man caught up in multiple extraordinary events is an engaging one. Depictions of supposedly coldhearted New York as opposed to the warmth of the South manifest themselves mainly in Sarah’s restaurant, the community’s heart and soul, and Kopet creates colorful characters who almost always have motives. The drug subplot keenly critiques America’s beastly criminal justice system. Gary’s struggles, both economic and romantic, are universal and fit well into the ever evolving storyline. The novel does have some excess bulk, however, and a leaner version could have offset some methodical writing toward the end.
While this book could be more concise, the protagonist’s story of rebuilding his life in the South remains appealing.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4414-6719-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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