With prickly yet endearing Hattie, readers ponder the meaning of faith, commitment, love and loyalty without being fed easy...
In Jen’s latest (The Love Wife, 2004, etc.) a retired teacher—the daughter of an American missionary who abandoned organized Christianity and a Chinese father descended from Confucius—struggles to put her life back together after the deaths of her husband and best friend.
Hattie Kong, 65, has lived as an outsider in America since she was sent here from China after the Communist takeover in that country. After being widowed she moves to Riverlake, the New England vacation town where she spent summers as a girl. Two years later she is embedded in the community but remains deeply lonely, turning mainly to her dogs for companionship. So when a family of Cambodian refugees moves in next door, she can’t help involving herself in their troubled lives, giving them a wheelbarrow for their garden and befriending the teenage daughter, Sophy. But Hattie’s understanding of the family’s complex history is dangerously limited, and when Sophy becomes “born again” under the influence of a local woman whose brand of fundamental Christianity Hattie distrusts, the girl turns against not only Hattie but her troubled older brother with near tragic results. At the same time, retired biology professor Carter Hatch, the love of Hattie’s life, turns up in town to waken long-dormant and confusing emotions. Newly arrived in America from China, Hattie lived with the Hatches, a prominent family of intellectuals. Although she and Carter had only one sexual encounter before they married other people, they shared an unspoken bond as young biologists until he let her down professionally. Now they play a painful game of approach-avoidance. Meanwhile, Hattie’s Chinese relatives besiege her with requests that she re-bury her parents’ remains in the family’s Confucian cemetery for reasons she dismisses as superstitious.
With prickly yet endearing Hattie, readers ponder the meaning of faith, commitment, love and loyalty without being fed easy answers (except against the stereotypically villainous fundamentalist Christians). But the usually deft Jen has thrown too many characters into the stew, serving up a novel of ideas more easily admired than enjoyed.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-27219-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
© Copyright 2023 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
