Ambitious and well written, but way over the top.
An overwrought first novel, in which a young wife and mother encounters dust storms and despair in Depression-era Colorado.
Bena Jonssen and her husband, a physician, are moving to the small town of Pueblo with their seven-week-old son because back at the private clinic where he worked in Rochester, Minnesota, Dr. Ted Jonssen refused to give morphine to a woman who proved to be the mayor’s daughter. Or maybe her accusation that he molested her was true: the Jonssen marriage is already fraught with Bena’s knowledge of Ted’s infidelities. The action gets even more unpleasant in Pueblo, where the Jonssens’ babysitter matter-of-factly displays cigarette burns inflicted by her mother—and in an alley, Bena finds a pregnant prostitute sucking meat juices from butcher-shop paper. The local elite, subjects of Bena’s articles in The Pueblo Chieftain, also harbor nasty secrets. The Mineral Palace, built to promote Colorado’s mining wealth but now crumbling away on the outskirts, serves as an apt (albeit crushingly obvious) metaphor for this place of failed dreams and moral rot. To her credit, Julavits looks beyond her personal experiences for fictional material, but her reach exceeds her grasp. Everything is too studied, and none of the emotions rings quite true, not even Bena’s concern for her baby, who is alarmingly unresponsive to the world around him. The atmosphere is so bleak from the beginning that the increasingly grim developments become almost comical, though no one will be laughing at two horrific murders involving children or sordid revelations of sexual abuse and intra-family violence. Even the mysterious cowboy who attracts Bena ultimately commits a violent act, which is as implausible as the anachronistic talk at the Chieftain about newspapers “now competing with movies, books, and radio” as entertainment. It’s all too much; without the emotional anchor of characters to care about, the apocalyptic tone Julavits cultivates seems more affected than earned.
Ambitious and well written, but way over the top.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2000
ISBN: 0-399-14622-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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