Backward, ever backward, through sentences which sinuously, sonorously curl around parenthetical phrases and elliptical clauses, "vagariously" winds this retrospective of the life of Henry Dodd Worthington as now through "experience's actual disorder and inconsecutiveness" he tries to reconcile himself as he was (sufficiently remote to elicit a third person referral) with the man he now is in late middle age. . . . This doubtful construction is only intended as a warning to readers of Mr. Cozzens' new book which is his first novel in ten years and in which he has completed his mastery of the involute sentence. (Ibid.: "Heart conturbed, with dissolution's icy wind on him he does not, he cannot, elect to look ahead and, trembling, prefigure in the final gloom of night the river's calamitous sliding without intermission over the rock edge and wreathed with spray and vapor thundering down.") For those not by patience possessed, trying. . . . En avant—with Cozzens' Last Puritan as he assembles the parts of his life which, with a certain amount of grave questioning and judicious qualifying, have been important in this spectator-participant's total experience: his birth from a long line of acknowledged academic eminence and material affluence; his grandfather, seer and sage, who lived until 99 and repudiated Freud; his first seduction—an "unnerved unable blushing boy" at the hands of-an older woman; his marriage and divorce; his impatience with the marital capriciousness of his' daughter; his own ingenuous stance as a young man who found the workaday world of money unrelated to real life and its later reversal as via a Mind Power course he achieved a Madison Avenue empire, etc. etc. This reflective reconnaissance of "the kinds of unknowing in individual human experience" if parsed and pursued to its conclusion some six lines later, is intended to have "meaning for every man." Perhaps for Mr. Cozzens' admirers, although in Henry Dodd Worthington he seems to have removed himself to a considerable degree from his time and ours.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1968
ISBN: 0151621608
Page Count: -
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace & World
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1968
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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