Dribbling sentiment, square-wheeled characters of absolute nobility, and puffs of historical personalities: those are the dubious attractions of this Denker clanker about a brace of married doctors, mainly in the US, 1848-1885. In spite of difficulties facing Jews in 19th-century Vienna, David Lilliendahl presses on to finish his medical studies with distinction; then, however, his participation in a student revolutionary-movement will send him to America. And, though armed with the knowledge he acquired while assisting the great medical pioneer Semmelweis (who found the cause of puerperal fever), David is also burdened with the dread of being called upon to perform surgery—a task at which, in an emergency, he has once failed. Meanwhile, New York WASP Mary Sinclair becomes one of the first students of the Philadelphia Female Medical School, then attends (as the only woman student) the École de MÉdecine of Paris. So, eventually, Mary and David will meet during a Manhattan anti-slavery riot—and soon are both appointed to Jews Hospital. They marry; Mary, in spite of her father's horror, is drawn to Judaism, converting: "The long and tragic history of a people ennobled by sacrifice and suffering began to affect her." When Civil War comes, David will serve in the Union Army in Virginia: he loses his fear of surgery in the midst of the under-supplied hospital camaraderie and a nightmare of death. (He even fraternizes with the enemy—when a Confederate Colonel surprises him with: "Bist du ein yid?") Reunited, and the parents of young Davey, Mary and David continue their fight for progressive medicine; in private and hospital practice they cope with cholera, diphtheria, and TB. And though Mary has a nervous breakdown when they lose son Davey, after the birth of Amos, to diphtheria, Dr. Abraham Jacobi comes to the rescue with good sense and dream analysis: Mary returns to her work, joining David in the crusades for pasteurized milk and sweatshop reform. . . and so on through the years. Denker (Outrage, The Actress, etc.) combines two tried-and-true commercial genres here: doctor heroics and Jewish-family history. Along with Semmelweis, he tosses in such guest-star giants as Lister, Koch, and Pasteur—who says: "I think we. . . are selected by God to make our personal human sacrifices on the altar of medical ignorance." But, while some readers will be drawn by the subject-matter appeal, they'll soon discover that—with little convincing period ambience, only a smidgin of real medical history, and dull, dull people—this is one doctor-novel that's generally anesthetic.
Pub Date: Feb. 8, 1982
ISBN: 038067405X
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1982
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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