The enduring prejudices, resentments, and regrets boiling away just beneath the surface of small-town life are given a thorough (and salutary) airing in southern writer Daugharty's provocative new work (Necessary Lies, 1995, etc.). Chanell, a ``sassy, independent, and voluptuous'' beautician in Cornerville, Georgia, turns 40 with no expectation of great changes in her life. Recently shed of her good 'ol boy boob of a husband, she is, if somewhat sardonic, basically comfortable with her routines and with her central role in the community. Chanell knows that in her customer's eyes a beautician, like a preacher, ``is supposed to be perfect—to look good, and act good and make them look good too.'' Suddenly, though, her customers disappear, and everyone seems to be talking about her: She ``could feel their tongues, like knives, slicing through her heart.'' A customer, while doing genealogical research, has discovered that one of Chanell's ancestors was black, and in the South, Daugharty suggests, the great sin is still ``not having been born well.'' Chanell knows that in a town in which one is ``either pitied or damned'' she is no longer a fit subject for pity. Daugharty's portrait of Cornerville, of the uneasy relationships between races, of the seemingly eternal rhythms of lives still spent very close to the land, is memorable and exact: travelling familiar terrain, she makes it fresh again. But she lifts the novel above a sharp-eyed inventory of race relations in her portrait of Chanell, who, at first devastated by her treatment, discovers a wit and self- sufficiency she had been unaware of. Her bold campaign to confront the townspeople, to make them see themselves as they are (aided by one lifelong friend and by a cantankerous elderly lawyer, himself an ``outsider'') is startling, and quite stirring. Life, the lawyer tells Chanell, is about ``how you hold up under the weight of what comes down on you.'' Chanell does so, triumphantly, in this original and unsettling novel. (Regional author tour)
Pub Date: April 3, 1996
ISBN: 0-06-017379-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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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