Marshall (Walkabout, 1984, a YA) gives us an unconventional hero—likable and admirable, if a shade remote. Still, if you’re...
Both stirring and touching, a novel about surviving a gamut of ordeals.
In 1942, a young, adventurous officer in England’s Royal Navy volunteers for a mission that will take him to Antarctica. Lt. James Lockwood thinks he’s part of a task force charged with deploying a secret weather station to play a role in combating submarine warfare, and he’s right, up to that point. But there are secrets within secrets. All that his commander, Captain Ede, will acknowledge is that he has sealed orders—for the mission head’s eyes only. By this time, however, Lockwood has fallen so irrevocably in love with the starkly beautiful land he’s come to that almost everything else is irrelevant. And the fact is the weather station does matter, regardless of what’s being concealed by the Royal Navy. The station’s existence is accidentally discovered. The German U-boat commander who stumbles on it shells it mercilessly, intent on leveling the station and killing all who manned it. Lockwood, elsewhere on assignment, escapes, then finds himself in a Robinson Crusoe position, marooned on 20 million square miles of ice-bound continent, “as effectively cut off from the rest of the world as if he had been on the moon.” Through sheer force of will, dauntless courage, and some luck, he makes it back home—only to be viewed darkly by the British Admiralty. How close, his superiors wonder, did Lockwood get to their hidden agenda? Now, though, with a hidden agenda of his own, he tells them repeatedly: “The past is another country. And I don’t live there any more.”
Marshall (Walkabout, 1984, a YA) gives us an unconventional hero—likable and admirable, if a shade remote. Still, if you’re an environmentalist or, at the very least, a sympathizer, this is a book for you.Pub Date: Dec. 11, 2000
ISBN: 1-56947-224-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2000
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
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BOOK REVIEW
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Dated sermonizing on career versus motherhood, and conflict driven by characters’ willed helplessness, sap this tale of...
Lifelong, conflicted friendship of two women is the premise of Hannah’s maudlin latest (Magic Hour, 2006, etc.), again set in Washington State.
Tallulah “Tully” Hart, father unknown, is the daughter of a hippie, Cloud, who makes only intermittent appearances in her life. Tully takes refuge with the family of her “best friend forever,” Kate Mularkey, who compares herself unfavorably with Tully, in regards to looks and charisma. In college, “TullyandKate” pledge the same sorority and major in communications. Tully has a life goal for them both: They will become network TV anchorwomen. Tully lands an internship at KCPO-TV in Seattle and finagles a producing job for Kate. Kate no longer wishes to follow Tully into broadcasting and is more drawn to fiction writing, but she hesitates to tell her overbearing friend. Meanwhile a love triangle blooms at KCPO: Hard-bitten, irresistibly handsome, former war correspondent Johnny is clearly smitten with Tully. Expecting rejection, Kate keeps her infatuation with Johnny secret. When Tully lands a reporting job with a Today-like show, her career shifts into hyperdrive. Johnny and Kate had started an affair once Tully moved to Manhattan, and when Kate gets pregnant with daughter Marah, they marry. Kate is content as a stay-at-home mom, but frets about being Johnny’s second choice and about her unrealized writing ambitions. Tully becomes Seattle’s answer to Oprah. She hires Johnny, which spells riches for him and Kate. But Kate’s buttons are fully depressed by pitched battles over slutwear and curfews with teenaged Marah, who idolizes her godmother Tully. In an improbable twist, Tully invites Kate and Marah to resolve their differences on her show, only to blindside Kate by accusing her, on live TV, of overprotecting Marah. The BFFs are sundered. Tully’s latest attempt to salvage Cloud fails: The incorrigible, now geriatric hippie absconds once more. Just as Kate develops a spine, she’s given some devastating news. Will the friends reconcile before it’s too late?
Dated sermonizing on career versus motherhood, and conflict driven by characters’ willed helplessness, sap this tale of poignancy.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-36408-3
Page Count: 496
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007
BOOK TO SCREEN
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