A beautiful family tale with lifelike characters that could have benefited from a stronger structure.
A pregnant Iraqi-American war veteran hides out on the property of a young seminarian in this novel.
Theodore Dash has returned to his mother’s northern Michigan hometown after the death of his grandfather. He learns that his relative has left him property while his brother, Nate, who is in the military in Iraq, is bequeathed $10,000. Theodore has been in a seminary and is conflicted about whether to return to it. The town of Empire is a magical place to him, a lush paradise on the Lake Michigan shore, full of happy childhood memories and surrounded by blooming apple orchards. There is also Brigid Birdsey, a young bar owner, whom Theodore is growing closer to. Throughout the narrative, poems written by a woman named Zaima al-Aziz appear, and eventually Zaima herself arrives in Empire. She is a young veteran just back from the Iraq war, and she is in the early stages of pregnancy. She finds refuge in a church but soon makes her way to the Dash homestead. Hiding out in the barn, she keeps a low profile, unwilling to return to her parents’ home in Dearborn, and not wanting to make contact with the Dash family, at least not yet. Theodore’s mother, Isabelle, a high-powered Chicago lawyer, was “never cut out to swim” in this piddling “little fish bowl.” She encourages Theodore to sell the property and use the money to help his brother get settled once he returns from Iraq. When Zaima finally becomes known to Theodore, a story begins to emerge that calls into question family relationships and everyone’s long-term plans. Packard (Paint the Bird, 2013, etc.) paints a gorgeous picture of northern Michigan and is clearly well-versed in the ins and outs of life around the Great Lakes, from small towns to Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive. The emotions that these places evoke in the characters are well-described, as is the desire to be near people but not too close. But the novel meanders in the middle, and the absence of a strong story arc becomes obvious. Details about characters are revealed slowly over time, making it a long wait for the inevitable confrontation that is bound to occur near the end of the book.
A beautiful family tale with lifelike characters that could have benefited from a stronger structure.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-57962-528-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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