A haunting and beautiful tale of friendship, forgiveness, and forgetting.
Two men—a wayward teenager and a weathered priest—share their demons in this debut novel.
Jonathan, a high school student from Oregon, knows that there has to be more for him than a low-paying job and a dysfunctional family. Donald is an untraditional member of the clergy—he drinks, smokes, and fixes motors of all kinds. Donald didn’t begin as a man of God. He only became a priest because he killed the mobster ultimately responsible for his son’s death. Jonathan moves to Texas with a desire for manual labor; he wants to work on oil rigs (“Jonathan had found his unlikely way south from the pioneer northwest, touched by the infinite sky and still raw with wilderness. Mountains where men do not rule”). He finds Donald, and the two, each suffering in his own way, form an unlikely bond. As both men’s stories fly through the years, their unease and obvious respective neuroses ratchet higher and higher—Jonathan falls for his boss’s daughter, who will never love him, and Donald fantasizes about murdering the man who actually killed his son—bringing the work to an end that is tense, poetic, and heart-stopping. In this novel (funded, incidentally, by a Kickstarter campaign), forgiveness remains elusive. A subtle and yet masterly writer, Watson eschews the conventions of everyday prose (capitalization, punctuation, etc.) for his own style. Though it’s a bit confusing at first, it’s best to just go along with the author on his deeply layered and heartbreaking ride. The story is told through a sequence of vignettes—a Mexican restaurant on Cinco de Mayo night, a graduation party, a trip to the hardware store—and each one complexly falls atop the next, pushing both the tension and the story faster until it bursts, albeit gorgeously, in a final climax. The end is both gut-wrenching and nearly addictive, as if the reader couldn’t possibly take another bite and yet still craves more. Watson’s prose vacillates between short, choppy dialogue and long, luxuriating sentences, as though he couldn’t decide which skill to show off. One misstep is the book’s occasional illustrations—they distract from the lushness of the words on the page. Watson’s talent is obvious, and this arresting work should stay with readers, passages popping up like bubbles when they least expect it.
A haunting and beautiful tale of friendship, forgiveness, and forgetting.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-692-51020-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Green Gate Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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