You would have to be deaf to miss the John Millington Synge in Cady’s twanging, Twain-like tall tale. But you can always...
Uncivil actions at the Hood Canal find an immortal entity dragging cars into the Puget Sound sluice’s wide and dismal depths.
Cady goes phantasmological again, as in Inagehi (1994), which bodied forth the Native American myth of part-human/part-spirit Nunnehi. But the author of The American Writer: Shaping a Nation’s Mind (1999) not only likes to get at the spirit of a region and go for the mytho-cosmic, he also admires giving a good Irish jig to his sentence and each word its winsome whirl in the moonlight. So when a young wreck hauler comes into Bertha’s Beer and Bait, home of pool hustlers, and speaks of the car he’s just hauled out of Hood Canal with a guy and a lady in it, he must say fancifully, “A hell of a thing to do to a Buick.” And then this playboy of the Puget Sound adds, “A’ course it’s busted up a little.” After the pining blacksmith Sugar Bear hammers a hole into the head of an unwholesome man for his nasty remark about virginal young witch Green Annie, he sinks the body deep into Hood Canal, car and all. The lovelorn young witch then makes up wild tales to distract the cops from thinking about the missing man and invents a car-crushingly oversensitive Water Fury that twists Studebakers into love knots. When low rainfall shrinks the canal, the dunked car is exposed but the body is gone. Then the tow-truck kid loses his Ranchero to the Stinking Thing, and a babbling canal fisherman sees the Creature hover and gangle below him like something out of Lovecraft.
You would have to be deaf to miss the John Millington Synge in Cady’s twanging, Twain-like tall tale. But you can always depend on Cady for a full-blooded monster and a big damn contest between good and evil. It’s that Pacific Northwest darkness coursing in his veins, whatever the comedy.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-28079-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2001
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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