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RECESSIONAL

In his 41st book, Michener (Creatures of the Kingdom, 1993, etc.) offers a feel-good vision of life in a complex for the elderly, oddly skewed by its young protagonist. Obstetrician Andy Zorn has been chased out of the medical profession by unfair malpractice suits and eagerly accepts a job as director of the Palms, a Florida facility consisting of residential apartments, an infirmary, and a hospice (the center's owner cautions Zorn to avoid the word because "it's ugly, frightening and reeks of death"). On the drive down to Florida from Chicago, Zorn plays good Samaritan and rescues a woman who loses her legs in a car accident, but after getting her to the hospital he scurries away for fear of being the subject of yet another malpractice suit. With his usual verbosity, Michener has Zorn handle with aplomb challenges that range from Alzheimer's to a constantly malfunctioning frozen yogurt machine in the Palms's dining room. Some of these episodes are entertaining (if in a very cozy way), but the focus is on Zorn's work in managing the facility rather than the lives of those who live there, and there is nothing surprising to win new Michener converts here. Although the Palms is described as possessing an idyllic, race-blind atmosphere, Michener occasionally exhibits racial insensitivity, as when he says of an African-American nurse, "If one looked only at her ample face, one might have expected her to speak in a typical black dialect." Often it seems as though characters are being depicted as somewhat thickheaded just to give Michener the opportunity to expound on a subject he has researched heavily; Zorn's ignorance of AIDS is frankly unimaginable. As expected, there is a fair amount of death in this book, but never without an epiphany and a heavy dose of sentimentality. When the beautiful young woman Zorn rescued on the way to Florida tracks Zorn down and insists that she can only recover under his care and he allows her to move into the Palms, an inspirational, happy ending becomes inevitable. Wooden and schematic.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994

ISBN: 0-679-43612-X

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994

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A LITTLE LIFE

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. 21, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

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

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