A tale of random violence and its aftereffects narrated by a 17-year-old honor student who speaks in such bloated and unlikely prose it makes you wonder whether Schweighardt (Homebodies, 1994, etc.) has listened to any teenagers latelyor if she's ever read The Catcher in the Rye. Ginny Jarrell is in a New Jersey diner with three friends when a gunman walks in and opens fire. In the aftermath, one of Ginny's friends and two other innocent bystanders are dead, along with the gunman, who has shot himself. The teenagers who witnessed this carnage have various traumatic reactions. One starts to drink; another abandons her old friends and switches to private school. Ginny's own response, never fully explained, is, first, to take a temporary vow of silence that entails weeks of using hand signals and writing notes to communicate; and, second, acquire a guna process that involves blackmailing a classmate who lives in a slum and therefore seems likely to have the necessary low-life connections. Meanwhile, there's trouble on the homefront, too, as Mom, recently separated from Dad, consoles herself by drinking too much zinfandel with best friend Ida. And Dad, in his bachelor apartment, appears to be entertaining a new girlfriend, a woman so alarmingly tall that Ginny privately refers to her as ``Goliath.'' Everything comes to a head on an island vacation when Ginny is stranded with two bickering adult couples (shades of Schweighardt's first novel), the gun goes off, and Ginny recovers her voicecomplete with overblown diction. It's apparent that Schweighardt knows the dramatic elements of a good, action-driven story, but such a story works only if the characters convince you. And, sadly, this bunchbeginning with Ginnynever does. Silence may well be golden, but it can't offset a narrative that's leaden.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-877946-61-3
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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