The latest novel by this former master of true grit southern fiction smartly steers away from the slapstick antics that so marred his last (Body, 1990). Even so, Crews still can't re-create the redneck eloquence of his early work. All the losers and weirdos who people this off-kilter book bear some kind of scar, literal or metaphoric. Pete Butcher, boxcar worker and former Marine, carries the heaviest burden—three years earlier he accidentally slammed his four-year-old brother in the forehead with a hammer, turning the bright and affectionate boy into a slobbering vegetable. Shortly thereafter, his parents die in a flaming car wreck, his brother is institutionalized, and the rest of Pete's family rejects him. This Georgia boy quits the University of Florida after four days and finds himself busting his hump in Jacksonville, trying to forget the past. Only no one will let him. Not his co-worker George, a bulking Rastafarian from Jamaica whose back is branded annually by his woman, Linga, a voodoo goddess with an elaborate design of scars on her beautiful mulatto face. When the family across the street from Pete's boardinghouse learns his story from a busybody neighbor, they too join the effort to redeem Pete, who feels ``cursed before man and God.'' The Leemers themselves are also part of the ``walking wounded''—mother Gertrude has just had a radical mastectomy; father Henry is a hard- working, overly cautious fellow; and daughter Sarah, who captures Pete's heart, fears the lump in her breast may be a legacy from her mother. After Henry dies from a heart attack, things take a turn for the bizarre, sucking Pete into a wild plot of corpse-snatching, cremation, and Rasta hocus-pocus. Only the strong and patient Sarah (``a woman to be reckoned with'') can pull Pete from this ``quagmire of craziness,'' and also reunite his family. A roomful of farting corpses indicates the depths to which Crews sinks here for comic relief. From sin to redemption, this highly improbable tale of hope and affirmation just doesn't cut it- -it's as belabored as the awkward title.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-74489-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1991
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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