A poignant and poetic depiction of a tumultuous childhood.
In Sniechowski's (Living Your Love Every Day, 2016, etc.) autobiographical debut novel, a young boy struggles with the dogmatic and austere religion of his Old World Polish family.
Jim is only 9 years old in 1950, and so the chaotic, alcohol-drenched weekly family gatherings at his home can be overwhelming affairs. His maternal grandparents, Anna and Antoni, immigrated to Detroit from rural Poland, by way of Ellis Island, and brought their farming-peasant ways and rigid devotion to Catholicism with them. The weekly parties are typically tempestuous and artfully rendered: rowdy, brimming with intramural rivalry and repressed emotion. They’re also full of the family’s Polish character: they live in a Polish neighborhood, worship in a Polish parish, and often speak what author James calls “Engpolsh”—a messy hybrid of English and Polish. Jim longs to win the elusive approval of his father, an emotionally distant but volatile man nicknamed “Ketchup” for the way that his face and neck redden when he’s enraged. The games they play—poker and pinochle—are only superficially playful, as they’re also the means by which the competitive family members assert their dominance. Violence also haunts these meetings; at one point, Jim’s father intervenes when a neighbor, Aleksandr, savagely strikes his own daughter. Apparently, her offense was wearing pants; throughout the book, the author powerfully depicts the group’s deeply ingrained sexism, as even the women tacitly accept the idea that men are superior. He also effectively shows how his family’s religious devotion is mixed with less spiritual elements, including pride, and how that leaves plenty of room for the vitriolic expression of racial bigotry. This is the first installment in the author’s Leaving Home Trilogy, and it’s a beautifully impressionistic novel that he describes as “autobiographical fiction.” The prose is powerfully evocative, ably capturing the bewildered isolation Jim experiences in his own home: “At nine years old, I could feel that barrenness, the draining effect of mechanical living; feel but not make sense of; feel in my body like a worm screwing itself into my every day.”
A poignant and poetic depiction of a tumultuous childhood.Pub Date: March 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-9707992-2-7
Page Count: 174
Publisher: Magic of Differences
Review Posted Online: April 30, 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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