An endearing, if protracted, novel of self-discovery.
Smith tells the story of a gay man’s tumultuous search for love in this erotic debut novel.
Wilson James doesn’t have much guidance while growing up in a dysfunctional African-American family in Los Angeles. His parents are split up: his father is a distant alcoholic and his mother is a woman given easily to fits of rage. Wilson can’t go to them with his everyday problems, let alone his secret, blossoming attraction to men. After an eye-opening tryst at age 13 with his father’s 24-year-old cousin, Wilson becomes certain that the love he needs can only come from other males—specifically, grown men with the experience to guide him through the unknown territory of pleasure. So begins his search for satisfaction, although his youth and vulnerability often place him in situations in which older men are able to take advantage of him in ways he doesn’t always understand. As Wilson learns to navigate adulthood, his quest for affection becomes a journey of personal growth in which he seeks to lay to rest the ghosts of his childhood and find a way to engender love—not only in the hearts of others, but also in himself. Smith is a sensual writer, executing every scene in lusty, baroque prose. Unfortunately, this lyricism often leads to overwrought passages that confuse rather than elucidate: “Fragile by circumstance, I was a slave to poignant inclusiveness, and my innocence preyed upon by trusted foes, as a naïve participant sworn into darkened territory.” Wilson and his primary love interests are well-drawn, and Smith teases out enough emotional investment to carry readers through to the end. That said, the novel would have benefited from a bit more compression; its 467 pages might have been stronger at a lean 300. On the whole, however, there’s a charm to Wilson’s voice and journey, his ability to find high drama in the commonplace, and his attempts to wring beauty from often grim (and sometimes grimy) surroundings.
An endearing, if protracted, novel of self-discovery.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5089-0788-6
Page Count: 496
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The fine Israeli writer Yehoshua (Open Heart, 1996, etc.) makes a lengthy journey into the year 999, the end of the first millennium. Indeed, it is the idea of a great journey that is the heart of the story here. Ben Attar, a Moroccan Jewish merchant has come a long distance to France to seek out his nephew and former partner Abulafia. Ben Attar, the nephew, and a third partner, the Muslim Abu Lutfi, had once done a lucrative business importing spices and treasures from the Atlas Mountains to eager buyers in medieval Europe. But now their partnership has been threatened by a complex series of events, with Abulafia married to a pious Jewish widow who objects vehemently to Ben Attar’s two wives. Accompanied by a Spanish rabbi, whose cleverness is belied by his seeming ineffectualness; the rabbi’s young son, Abu Lutfi; the two wives; a timorous black slave boy, and a crew of Arab sailors, the merchant has come to Europe to fight for his former partnership. The battle takes place in two makeshift courtrooms in the isolated Jewish communities of the French countryside, in scenes depicted with extraordinary vividness. Yehoshua tells this complex, densely layered story of love, sexuality, betrayal and “the twilight days, [when] faiths [are] sharpened in the join between one millennium and the next” in a richly allusive, languorous prose, full of lengthy, packed sentences, with clauses tumbling one after another. De Lange’s translation is sensitively nuanced and elegant, catching the strangely hypnotic rhythms of Yehoshua’s style. As the story draws toward its tragic conclusion—but not the one you might expect—the effect is moving, subtle, at once both cerebral and emotional. One of Yehoshua’s most fully realized works: a masterpiece.
Pub Date: Jan. 19, 1999
ISBN: 0-385-48882-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1998
An extremely powerful story of a young Southern Negro, from his late high school days through three years of college to his life in Harlem.
His early training prepared him for a life of humility before white men, but through injustices- large and small, he came to realize that he was an "invisible man". People saw in him only a reflection of their preconceived ideas of what he was, denied his individuality, and ultimately did not see him at all. This theme, which has implications far beyond the obvious racial parallel, is skillfully handled. The incidents of the story are wholly absorbing. The boy's dismissal from college because of an innocent mistake, his shocked reaction to the anonymity of the North and to Harlem, his nightmare experiences on a one-day job in a paint factory and in the hospital, his lightning success as the Harlem leader of a communistic organization known as the Brotherhood, his involvement in black versus white and black versus black clashes and his disillusion and understanding of his invisibility- all climax naturally in scenes of violence and riot, followed by a retreat which is both literal and figurative. Parts of this experience may have been told before, but never with such freshness, intensity and power.
This is Ellison's first novel, but he has complete control of his story and his style. Watch it.
Pub Date: April 7, 1952
ISBN: 0679732764
Page Count: 616
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1952
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