An enjoyable rumination on the line between artistry and occupation.
In this novel, a skilled woodcarver bites off more than he can chew with a piece of valuable hardwood.
Joe Carroll is a woodcarver. For him, it’s an art, but most of the jobs he takes are mundane kitchen renovations and the like. Even in these, he finds satisfaction, such as carving 15 kitchen cupboard doors with delicately painted herbs for a difficult customer. Life isn’t so bad. Joe and his wife, Maggie, own a small place on a beautiful stretch of the Connecticut River, where they are raising their son, Will. Joe’s wood supplier has been telling him for over a year about a big mahogany board he knows of—“1¼ x 6 feet x 14 feet”—for sale by two older brothers a couple of towns over. When Joe finally drives over to look at it, it’s a thing of beauty: “He guessed that it may have been months or years since a shaft of light had illumined it through the crooked doorway. ‘Will, look at this thing.’ Joe couldn’t pretend that it was not amazing….What was this monster piece of wood doing out in this shed?” The board has a history stretching back to the 1940s—a story tied to one brother’s deep regret—and Joe decides to buy it. He wants to make a table and even sells the piece preemptively to his wife’s wealthy boss. It may prove to be Joe’s masterpiece—that is, if he doesn’t screw the whole thing up. Martin’s prose is sunny and engaging even when he gets into the nitty-gritty of carpentry jargon: “He was just getting it down to round, down to where the four flat sides of the lumber all disappeared at about the same time. Joe feared that he’d gone a little too deep in one spot. He threw the on/off switch that years ago he had rigged to the lathe’s old washing machine motor.” It’s not at all a high-stakes read in the traditional sense: The book is really just about a man trying to make a wooden table. It’s the cozy, pleasant sort of novel readers might pick up if they don’t want something too strenuous but don’t mind a story that takes its time to unfold.
An enjoyable rumination on the line between artistry and occupation.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-68513-015-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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PERSPECTIVES
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