A beautifully rendered second novel (Daughters of the House, 1993) set in a remote Indian Shangri-La that—like the best of fables—limns a time of benevolent transformation. When Vidya, a woman of great insight, wakes to see a flock of cranes ``weaving their patterns'' in the sky over Mohurpukur, she knows that change is on the way. As she tells her beloved nephew, the eccentric but intuitively sympathetic Kunal, whom she raised and in whose home she now lives, ``the shuttle goes backwards and forwards, much the same year after year, and then the pause, like a hand wavering over a work basket looking for a new color to thread into the fabric of our days.'' And change begins that very morning as Kunal, the last of the great Kushari men, meets a starving and troubled stranger, Vikram Sen—a well-known playwright and the putative agent of change—who has just been released from prison after serving a brief sentence for his part in his wealthy wife's suicide. The Kushari family are also troubled: Gargi, who married Kunal on the rebound, mourns her lost love; Kunal regards himself as a failure in everything—from his work as a college principal to his role as a father; daughter Pia is terrified of Miss Bose, her bullying teacher; and old Miss Kushari worries that she will have to sell her Big House. Kunal feeds Vikram and directs him to the Big House, where Vikram finds work and unexpected happiness. Soon old secrets are revealed, the wicked routed, goodness rewarded, and true love found at last: perhaps too many easy happy endings, but then this is essentially a fable about the people who live in a wondrous place ``that distilled happiness and restored souls.'' Wisdom gently deployed in luminous prose: a story Indian in setting but universal in its appeal to the human heart. A distinguished accomplishment.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-345-38366-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1993
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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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