A remarkable tale of political maturity, and its steep price.
In Flanders’ (An Interlude in Berlin, 2018, etc.) historical novel, an idealistic diplomat in the Kennedy administration becomes increasingly disillusioned by the government’s grim conduct of the Vietnam War.
Dillon Randolph was groomed to become “a member of the club, one of the young men on the rise, an Establishment favorite”; his family name is well known in American politics, and his father, John Custis Randolph, is currently a Democratic congressman. But Dillon is also a poet who’s published two collections of his work and has the soul of a romantic. In 1961, he takes a job at the State Department and joins a group of friends—they call themselves the “Group of Five”—all “moved by the young President’s stirring rhetoric and call for a new generation of leadership.” Dillon is specifically recruited to work for the Bureau of Intelligence and Research under the tutelage of its new “charismatic leader,” Roger Hilsman. It’s a position that gives him a privileged perch from which to see the unfolding of the war in Southeast Asia. When a fellow member of the Group of Five—Palmer Knox, a CIA agent—kills himself out of despair of his own involvement in the execution of the war, Dillon is faced with a grave moral crisis that challenges more than his politics. Flanders intelligently chronicles Dillon’s growing disenchantment, not only with the bloody, “grim pragmatism” that he encountered regarding the management of the war, but also the “fractures in the Great Society” to which he was so devoted after Kennedy’s assassination. Over the course of the novel, the author deftly portrays the tumultuous and complex political climate of the day, which simultaneously contained shimmering optimism about the future, dread of the dangers posed by the Cold War, and nihilistic espionage. The author closely hews to the historical record, but artfully weaves a poignant human element into it; both Dillon and Palmer are emotionally convincing as characters. Overall, this is a nuanced novel that offers a historically edifying account of a troubled time.
A remarkable tale of political maturity, and its steep price.Pub Date: July 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9908675-5-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Munroe Hill Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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