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A SONG OF STONE

A grim, mordant portrait of the corrosive effects of moral corruption and a generalized atmosphere of violence, played out against the brutal background of a Bosnian-style war. Banks (Complicity, 1995, etc.) has always demonstrated an appetite for tackling such large questions as the origins of sin and the possibility of redemption, and he has demonstrated a willingness to take risks. Both qualities are on display here. In an unnamed European country, and in a day very like the present, an aristocrat and his lover flee the ancient family castle in a time of troubles. A civil war of swirling, uncertain outline is pitching bands of partisans against one another. The aristocrat is captured by one such band, ruled by a particularly lethal female officer (the Lieutenant, or “Loot”), and taken back to the castle, where the ragged but vicious group sets itself up in style and carries on a desultorily bloody campaign against other partisans. The gruesome climax is urged into motion by Loot’s infatuation with the nameless aristocrat’s lover; as it turns out, she’s not his wife but his sister. (The two have been conducting a violent affair since they were teenagers.) Much of the story, narrated by the erstwhile lord of the manor, shuttles between his recollections of a privileged—even if perverse—life and his reactions to present horrors (villages are burned, refugees randomly executed, and some children mysteriously crucified). When he stumbles on Loot and his sister in bed together, a showdown is inevitable. The metaphors here (the castle as a site of power and corruption; an enervated aristocracy) aren—t new. But Banks imbues them with fresh vigor; and finds in the reflections of his bright but twisted narrator a core of sorrow in the human heart, and an angry appetite for destruction. Not for the squeamish, but those looking for a confrontational work will find this a daring, deeply unsettling meditation on the very human face of evil.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998

ISBN: 0-684-85353-1

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1998

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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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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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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

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

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