There is something so refreshing and genuine about this book, coming partly from the bumpy weave of its unpredictable story...
Love and profit, fear and orneriness, intention and accident…all present and accounted for in this study of why our lives turn out the way they do.
“Everyone knows this can happen. People travel and they find places they like so much they think they’ve risen to their best selves just by being there.” So begins this kaleidoscopic story cycle, stretching from 1970 to the present, from Rikers Island and Richmond, Virginia, to Sultanahmet, Turkey, and Berlin. With a group of characters woven together by a butterfly-effect chain of decisions, accidents, and consequences, Silber (Fools, 2013, etc.) examines the dynamics of relationships across races and cultures, the ramifications of smuggling both American cigarettes and European antiquities, the need to find and honor family, and the intentions to sell a Turkish rug, to start one’s own eyebrow-grooming business, to somehow make right things that have gone very wrong. Practically every page contains some insight you want to linger over. For example, a truck driver who has just been in a very bad wreck considers his past brushes with death: “Once when he took a beautiful drunken walk across a frozen pond and midway the ice cracked and broke. Once when he was in a car with a woman who drove them off the road into a gully. Once when he was in a fight with a guy who was crazier than he seemed. He’d had a good time when he was young, but in certain respects youth was overrated.” Or, a young single mother considering her boyfriend’s release from Rikers: “Jail doesn’t always change people in good ways, but in Boyd’s case it made him quieter and less apt to throw his weight around.”
There is something so refreshing and genuine about this book, coming partly from the bumpy weave of its unpredictable story and partly from its sharply turned yet refreshingly unmannered prose. A winner.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61902-960-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
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 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
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