A well-crafted though sometimes sententious account of racial conflict.
Two men from the South—one white and one black—forge a friendship that challenges their notions about race.
When only 10, James Walker witnesses his cousin’s lynching by Klansmen, a gruesome spectacle that shakes him to the core. The Rev. Jones, his Baptist minister, consoles and inspires him to use education as a means to transcend the racial prejudice he will surely experience. James moves to Savannah, Georgia, to live with his Aunt Violet, a schoolteacher, who helps him achieve academic excellence and attend Morehouse College. After graduating cum laude, he enters the United States Air Force Officer Training Program. He continually encounters poisonous discrimination but responds with nonviolent protest. Meanwhile, Tom Stirling grows up on a peanut plantation in Georgia under the influence of omnipresent white supremacist views. Tom also enters the Air Force Officer Training Program and, en route to Biloxi, Mississippi, meets James—the first meeting between the two is an inauspicious one. But Tom eventually develops a deep respect for James’ intelligence, and an authentic friendship blossoms after James helps Tom recover from a debilitating injury while on tour in Vietnam. Debut author Kelsey slowly uncoils the protagonists’ moral revelations—both men are saddled with powerful, emotional reasons to be distrustful of the other. The author adroitly depicts the paradoxes of Southern culture—genteel civility and educational refinement pitted against brutal violence and blinkered racial prejudice. Kelsey’s writing is unfailingly clear, but he can slide into didacticism. Also, the dialogue can be bloodlessly earnest. Consider Tom’s unspoken self-reflection after he’s dumped by a girlfriend: “I can’t believe what just happened. We were so close. We needed each other. I know I fell for her, but maybe I was only fooling myself thinking she loved me.”
A well-crafted though sometimes sententious account of racial conflict.Pub Date: Dec. 8, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9992217-0-9
Page Count: 390
Publisher: KrazyLegs Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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