Minot works hard to pull it all together, but this is very uneven—and often very frustrating—work.
A long family history of incompatibility and enmity shatters several lives in this ambitious first novel, set in urban Massachusetts and on an island off the coast of Maine.
Initially, the narrator is Timmy Curtis, a 30-ish boy-man whose adulthood and marriage are shadowed by the figures of his late mother (killed when her car collided with a moving train) and distant “Dad” (a retired investment banker)—and, especially, by his free-floating younger brother Simon. The latter is a chronically under- or un-employed artist who subsists on “borrowed” money and maintains an angry nonrelationship with his dad, who wants Simon out of his life and refuses him living space in either of the family’s homes. When Simon secretly inhabits his old rooms, never noticed by his distracted father, things come to a head, even though the two never meet. Dad is found dead, and Simon is arrested and indicted for murder. The story then shifts among several viewpoints as well as past and present, juxtaposing the details of Simon’s ordeal (free on bail under surveillance, then house arrest) with numerous detailed flashbacks depicting the family’s retreats to its quiet haven on Burnt Island, and Simon’s increasingly conflicted standoffs with all the other Curtises except his impulsive “Mum” (whom Simon resembled as much as Timmy resembles buttoned-down Dad). The Blue Bowl (whose title denotes a missing object that suggests another theory of the murder) has a herky-jerky unevenness, marked by rambling sentences and muddy writing (the omnipresence of hippie jargon in Simon’s musings is particularly jarring) and sharp observations (“That’s horrible. She said it like a whore”) and images (“snow rested calmly over fields, loaved on cars”). And the predictable (though inconclusive) outcome of Simon’s trial is followed by an almost unbelievably lame last-minute surprise ending.
Minot works hard to pull it all together, but this is very uneven—and often very frustrating—work.Pub Date: April 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-394-57348-X
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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