A crusading novel that blends architectural elements with the beauty of nature to evoke the benefits of sustainable...
A young man receives a mysterious letter and map from the father he once thought dead in this debut novel.
Charlie Cadwell lost his mother at an early age and was raised by his grandmother, all the while believing his father never came back from the Vietnam War. But upon his college graduation, Charlie receives a letter from his long lost father asking him to come to him in Washington. There, he is met with a wondrous sight: the Fish Camp, an architectural utopia built upon the principles of enabling structures. Even more wondrous than the architecture he encounters at Fish Camp, however, is Maggie, the beautiful young woman who works as a nature conservationist. Reunited with his father, Charlie learns the truth behind their estrangement: broken by the Vietnam War, his father, CM, committed an act of treason and went underground. But CM has plans for Charlie; he wants him to present a design based on the Fish Camp for a contest soliciting ideas about the future of urban development. While Charlie decides whether or not to help his father, he embarks on building the last Fish Camp unit, mostly to impress and seduce Maggie. The book showcases what seem to be Alt’s two great loves: nature and architecture. With detailed, meticulous descriptions, Alt brings the Fish Camp to life and does a commendable job of explaining how it exemplifies the idea that building horizontal is more advantageous than building vertical. But Alt is equally concerned with the conservation of nature; Maggie’s battle against fish hatcheries works as metaphor for the entire battle to save the environment from destruction caused by humans. The lofty message, at times, feels a little too heavy handed with characters serving as uniformed stereotypes who don’t understand the negative consequences of their actions. Despite a rather rushed ending, Alt’s book draws to a satisfying conclusion that hinges on the strength of the relationships the author creates.
A crusading novel that blends architectural elements with the beauty of nature to evoke the benefits of sustainable development.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2011
ISBN: 978-1457507205
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Dog Ear Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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