This intriguing story of two dropouts from the “normal” world is the first half of a two-novel debut (followed by Semaphore in August) by the author of the story collections Spies in the Blue Smoke (1992) and Playing Out of the Deep Woods (1995, not reviewed). Hawkes’s protagonists are Paul Merline (who narrates) and John Suope, friends since 1952 when John, a US soldier serving in Korea (where he lost a leg), is treated by Paul, then a medic. After the war, the two drifted together and accepted employment by a secretive “Foundation” that sent them to the New Mexico desert to “map” remote land areas for purposes that will never be revealed to them. The story’s major actions occur in 1987, when the insular little world Paul and John have built for themselves is threatened. A young woman graduate student, Caliope Jones, camps out nearby, planning to build (literally) a town, then film its destruction by flood, for her doctoral dissertation project. —Dinosaur men— settle in for extensive archaeological excavations. And John announces that he’s met a woman and intends to live with her. Hawkes creates absorbing drama out of Paul’s mingled disorientation, reawakened sexuality, amusement, and outrage in a perfectly calculated narrative filled with snaky plot twists, rough humor (— . . . we could buy New Mexico and kick everybody out—), and an almost awestruck feel for the endangered integrity of beloved objects and places—physical presences that mean more to the surveyors than any people do: a “monkey-puzzle” tree, a “crash piece” that may be a UFO, a lowering elevation the two friends name the Tooth of Time. The novel is further distinguished by precise, sensuous prose and superbly compact descriptions, notably of landscape (an excursion by raft through a huge underground cavern located beneath a mountain range is especially compelling). The Orwellian enigma of “the Foundation” is more distraction than plot essential, but it’s the only real misstep in a highly accomplished debut.
Pub Date: July 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-878448-81-1
Page Count: 200
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1998
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
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