A thoughtful, meditative tale about the pain of youthful disillusionment.
A teenager battles alienation in his cloistered Polish neighborhood in this sequel.
In the 1950s, a quietly pensive 13-year-old named Jim lives in a working-class neighborhood in southwest Detroit, a homogenously Polish enclave still suffocated by Old World Roman Catholicism and an antiquated peasant ethos. Jim is inducted into a street gang called the Royal Lancers—his initiation required some petty larceny as a show of courage—but he’s small, lacks confidence, and is terrorized by Donny, a senior-ranking member infamous for his brutality. Jim attends the University of Detroit High School, an aspirationally named institution run by minor Jesuit despots; his Latin teacher tortures his pupils with his “priggish preciousness.” Jim feels oppressed by the hypocrisy of the religion that haunts his life—he disdains the “pompous piety” of his cruel grandmother—and slowly moves in the direction of a “defection” from it. He’s equally pulverized by the laconic disapproval of his father and the unexpressed sadness of his mother, and seems to have joined the Royal Lancers just to have a place other than home to spend time. He becomes deeply infatuated with a girl, Rachel Levin, and his pursuit of her eventually draws him toward a violent confrontation that compels him to interrogate the anti-Semitism seared into his religion’s provincial worldview. This is the second installment of Sniechowski’s (Worship of Hollow Gods, 2014) Leaving Home Trilogy, and while there is a narrative continuity between the two novels, the first needn’t be read in order to enjoy its sequel. The writing is poetically philosophical and infused with moral gravity, although it occasionally flirts with lesson-driven didacticism: “We were all of the same stock. Humanity. And the prejudice that was part of the foundation of my family, neighborhood, church, and religion, was not merely wrong, it was weak, bloated, a defilement of both the Jews and the Slavs.” Jim’s character is deeply drawn, with his emotional turmoil cleverly captured by his inner voice that sometimes encourages and sometimes tauntingly cajoles. The author is especially talented at depicting the paradoxical mix of frustration and exhilaration that marks adolescence.
A thoughtful, meditative tale about the pain of youthful disillusionment.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9913172-2-6
Page Count: 232
Publisher: JayEss Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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