Often inconsequential taken alone, the stories build incrementally to create a moving whole.
Ten interconnected tales about a tightknit Ukrainian neighborhood in 1960s Chicago: a first collection from the author of the novel The Sky Unwatched (2000).
Narrator Luba lives with her émigré parents and attends a local college where, eager to assimilate, she uses the name Linda. The first story she tells, “Steve’s Bar,” sets up the community’s generational divisions. Steve’s original patrons, mostly immigrants from DP camps after WWII, look up to officer Kharkevych, the cop they call on to avert neighborhood crises. But their college-age children watching the TV above the bar are nonplussed to see him among the other cops roughing up antiwar protesters from their campus. In “My Black Valiant,” the secondhand car Luba’s purchased, loses its potency as a symbol of rebellion after she catches her parents giggling in it one Sunday morning. “The Celebrity” is a famous Ukrainian poet’s widow whom Luba chauffeurs around in the Valiant. The woman is a money-grubbing phony, but her charisma works genuine magic on Luba and everyone else. A different kind of charisma is at work in “Saint Sonya.” Sonya became briefly famous for bleeding with stigmata during middle school, until Luba told on her for hanging out with boys. Now Sonya works in a bakery and is perfectly content. In “Obligation,” a young woman becomes unraveled when she recognizes a bag lady as the person who saved her life as a child in the camps. “Pani Ryhotska in Love” makes Luba jealous that the old woman can find romance with her aging boarder, especially since Luba’s crush on Pani Ryhotska’s artist son is a theme throughout the stories—finding a disillusioning climax in “The Prodigal Son Enters Heaven.” In the final piece, “John Mars, All American,” Luba faces her own ambivalence when she brings a potential suitor to Steve’s Bar, sees her world through his critical non-Ukrainian eyes, and loses interest in him.
Often inconsequential taken alone, the stories build incrementally to create a moving whole.Pub Date: April 11, 2003
ISBN: 1-56512-332-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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