A thoughtful case study that sometimes falls a bit flat as fiction.
The controversial construction of a dam throws a quiet Pennsylvania town into turmoil in this novel.
Even though Sam Kopco has been home from Vietnam for two years, he’s still beleaguered by the trauma of his memories, which visit him in flashbacks. He grew up in northeastern Pennsylvania in the Minisink Valley, an area now threatened by the construction of the Tocks Island Dam across the Delaware River by the Army Corps of Engineers. While some locals believe the dam will eventually be a boon to the economy, others worry about the ecological costs as well as the displacement of longtime residents from their land. Many complain that they’ve been poorly compensated for the property they’ve been ousted from—one woman, whose family had occupied her land for three generations, kills herself in despair when exiled from it. Meanwhile, Sam begins a romantic relationship with Holly, who works for the Monroe County Commissioner’s Office. But they keep their affair private since she’s in the midst of a messy divorce from Mark, whose father, Leo Kober, is her boss. Further complicating matters, Holly suspects Leo is tampering with official documents to hide the inflated prices he’s selling his land to the government for, despite the meager amounts others are fetching. Collins effectively relates the story from shifting first-person perspectives: Will Mead, a hippie academic attempting to establish a utopian community on land the federal government pines for; Loretta Shuster, a local who loses her farm and spearheads a campaign to block the dam project; Jack Neumann, the project manager for the dam’s construction who’s unconvinced it can be successfully built; and of course Sam and Holly. The author’s kaleidoscopic approach to narration produces a remarkably sympathetic rendering of warring interests—Collins trusts his readers to draw their own conclusions. But the writing is less than poetic—the dialogue in particular seems stiff and lifeless. In addition, the plot unfolds without sufficient discipline, meandering too far afield too often. But the restrained intelligence of the novel as a whole should appeal to those interested in the tension between economic revitalization and environmental responsibility.
A thoughtful case study that sometimes falls a bit flat as fiction.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-692-97944-0
Page Count: 250
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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