A set of penetrating and absorbing tales.
In Knox’s (After the Gazebo, 2015, etc.) latest short story collection, characters struggle to maintain connections with others despite natural disasters and more mundane circumstances, such as aging.
Haley and her parents hardly have it easy in drought-ridden Toledo, Ohio, in the opening title story. They take family outings to a nearly empty downtown; water is rationed, so Haley’s dad gives her some of his supply despite his own cracked lips. Other tales also feature social units, typically familial, facing menaces that bring emotional torment to the surface. A man named Owen, for example, in “Running Toward the Sun,” is racing to help raise money for breast and reproductive-system cancer research. But an unexpected calamity forces him to face the truth that he’s running from: the fact that his wife, a cancer survivor, has cheated on him multiple times. In “A Perpetual State of Awe,” a woman and her son are stuck inside their home due to a heavy snowstorm, and the abode is at risk of collapsing—much like her marriage. In other instances, families simply strive to stay together; an elderly, troubled couple finds common ground in “The Couple on the Roof.” There are occasional touches of sci-fi, but Knox so adeptly molds her believable characters that the apocalyptic settings seem less surreal. In “Nebraska,” for instance, a small-town woman searches for items in an overcrowded local grocery store that’s full of people who are missing body parts or growing extra ones. The muted aspect of the genre elements mirrors the cautious tone of Knox’s prose: “Houses are being built everywhere, exact replicas of each other excepting the color of the paint, or the direction the garage is facing.” The tales are effectively linked by recurring themes but also by recurring characters—most notably the tattooed loner Rattle, who makes three appearances as part of a doomed relationship (“Don’t Tease the Elephants”); as the father of an estranged daughter (“West on N Road”); and, possibly, on his deathbed (“The Slope of a Line”).
A set of penetrating and absorbing tales.Pub Date: June 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9967779-4-0
Page Count: 182
Publisher: Hollywood Books International
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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