A strong, compassionate first novel that strips the Vietnam peace movement of some of its myths by concentrating on the way it affects individuals. During the summer of 1967, narrator Dennis ``Itchy'' Shovlin, 17, mourns the death of his older brother, Patrick, a Marine killed in Vietnam. Itchy hates the war and its divisive impact on his family. (His father and brother Charlie are for it; he and his mother against.) Yet he recognizes that he too is a product of the cold war; as a child, he'd spend his allowance on canned goods to store in the bomb shelter he begged his father to build. Now, because of Patrick's death, Itchy is slowly becoming active in the local antiwar movement. He gets a full dose of 1960s-style sex, drugs, and radical politics from hotel owner Robin Debussy, who is organizing protests against a factory that makes machine guns. People's political motives aren't always pure here: A segment of Robin's group urges violence; they want to burn the plant down and battle the workers. Meanwhile, the town itself becomes split over the factory. To this mix, the author adds a number of love stories, a murder mystery, the appearance of a Gandhi-like prophet, and a little mysticism—all of which generally works. The only nagging flaw is a tendency, especially toward the end, for the characters to fall into didactic speeches. At one point, for instance, Robin proclaims, ``War's desperate and primitive, and when it's waged without moral justification and supported with lies and false appeals to patriotism and buried fears of man-made demons, we have to fight against it''—this from a person whose favorite words usually have four letters? Still, an often touching, surprisingly funny debut—originally brought out in 1993 and nowthe grand-prize winner in the first Writer's Digest Self-Published Book Awards.
Pub Date: June 26, 1995
ISBN: 1-55611-453-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Donald Fine
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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The years pass by at a fast and steamy clip in Blume’s latest adult novel (Wifey, not reviewed; Smart Women, 1984) as two friends find loyalties and affections tested as they grow into young women. In sixth grade, when Victoria Weaver is asked by new girl Caitlin Somers to spend the summer with her on Martha’s Vineyard, her life changes forever. Victoria, or more commonly Vix, lives in a small house; her brother has muscular dystrophy; her mother is unhappy, and money is scarce. Caitlin, on the other hand, lives part of the year with her wealthy mother Phoebe, who’s just moved to Albuquerque, and summers with her father Lamb, equally affluent, on the Vineyard. The story of how this casual invitation turns the two girls into what they call "Summer sisters" is prefaced with a prologue in which Vix is asked by Caitlin to be her matron of honor. The years in between are related in brief segments by numerous characters, but mostly by Vix. Caitlin, determined never to be ordinary, is always testing the limits, and in adolescence falls hard for Von, an older construction worker, while Vix falls for his friend Bru. Blume knows the way kids and teens speak, but her two female leads are less credible as they reach adulthood. After high school, Caitlin travels the world and can’t understand why Vix, by now at Harvard on a scholarship and determined to have a better life than her mother has had, won’t drop out and join her. Though the wedding briefly revives Vix’s old feelings for Bru, whom Caitlin is marrying, Vix is soon in love with Gus, another old summer friend, and a more compatible match. But Caitlin, whose own demons have been hinted at, will not be so lucky. The dark and light sides of friendship breathlessly explored in a novel best saved for summer beachside reading.
Pub Date: May 8, 1998
ISBN: 0-385-32405-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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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. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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