A quaint, evocative tale of a philosophical striver in early 20th-century America.
A humble man seeks personal and spiritual clarity in this historical novel.
Ostby’s follow-up to his World War I novel Men With Broken Faces (2010) turns its focus to the story of Jake Miller, “a feckless, undistinguished, mostly-reformed sponge” who struggles with binge drinking and the personal legacy of a miserable childhood and an abusive father. He also strives to understand his own version of the Tibetan Buddhist wheel of life, the bhavacakra, whose ups and downs seem to rule his life. The novel that chronicles his life opens in 1913 on a down point, with Jake drunk, facedown in a slough near his Montana wheat farm. He’s counseled by his stolid neighbor Lars Nordraak to clean himself up for the prospect of the arrival of his contracted wife, Mable, a clean-faced and unflappably upbeat woman who throws herself into their homesteading life. She’s a cheerful presence, though she understands Jake very little; his favorite book, for instance, is Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, which is lost on her. She forgives him his shortcomings—shortcomings he’s acutely aware of: “He possessed self-awareness,” he realizes, “but only in retrospect, and that was the conundrum.” As a young man in Iowa, he was kicked in the head by a mule and lay comatose for a week before he recovered, and the clear implication is that his inner world was never again the same. Ostby begins his tale in the first decade of the 20th century, when water dousing and patent medicines were still taken seriously in small-town America, even as rudimentary technology and the brand-new automobile were making their first appearances. Although the narrative can at times have a maddeningly wandering shapelessness, Ostby effectively brings to life small-town America of a century ago. And an uplifting thread runs through it all—“Forgive yourself,” Jake is advised, “Don’t bother with going to some priest for forgiveness; you have to forgive yourself”—which ultimately helps make Jake a winning Everyman.
A quaint, evocative tale of a philosophical striver in early 20th-century America.Pub Date: March 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-0991448203
Page Count: 284
Publisher: James Ostby
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2014
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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