A gifted Yorkshire novelist tackles his region's most famous literary family, illuminating their inner lives and the sources of their creativity. Hughes (The Rape of the Rose, 1993, etc.) lives not 20 miles from Haworth, staging ground for the Brontâs' short, tragic lives, and he ably captures the harsh natural beauty and even harsher human attitudes that informed the siblings' writings. More importantly, he sensitively delineates their thorny personalities: Charlotte, furious at the world for the injustices it visited on a poor, plain parson's daughter, prone to turning her anger on her family before she found a more fulfilling outlet writing Jane Eyre; Branwell, weak and dissipated, but possessed of a genuinely loving heart; Emily, whose mystical connection with the Yorkshire landscape left little room for human ties; and gentle, devout Anne. Their father, the Reverend Patrick Brontâ, gets a more measured treatment than some biographers have accorded him; Hughes emphasizes his pride in his daughters over the selfishness that also characterized the minister. The author hews to the known facts about this much-profiled family, though he imagines some intriguing local tales as the foundation for Emily's Wuthering Heights and speculates intelligently about the emotional wellsprings of Charlotte's novels. Sensibly, he focuses more on the siblings' intense relationships among themselves and with the divine order (questioned by all four with anguish) than on their literary achievements, which have been amply examined by generations of critics. Although Hughes paints well-rounded portraits of Charlotte and Emily, he basically reiterates the conclusions drawn by such biographers as Winnifred GÇrin; he really excels in depicting Anne and Branwell, whose death scenes are almost unbearably moving. The author evokes with fierce passion the dreadful seven months in 184849 during which consumption claimed first Branwell, then Emily, and finally Anne, almost equalling in intensity Charlotte's ghastly letters from that period. Nothing really new here, but, still, a sensitive, full-bodied rendering of the always fascinating Brontâs. (First printing of 60,000)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-14816-X
Page Count: 432
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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
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