Coomer’s canvas is too crowded. He does Scotland proud, but at the expense of the family rearranging itself back home—which...
Surprises and sucker punches keep things lively in this latest from Coomer (Apologizing to Dogs, 1999, etc.), a tale of emotional upheavals in a far-flung family about to be flung farther.
The family members converge on their original home in Fort Worth, Texas, for a funeral. Grandma Hutton has died at 89, and the bad-tempered old woman will be missed only by Aunt Edna, the daughter who cared for her devotedly for 22 years. This is Aunt Edna’s story, narrated by her niece Sarah. Besides working at an elementary school as cafeteria manager, Edna has found time to paint chairs, nothing but chairs (and they will eventually sell for megabucks). The funeral is a splendid set-piece, with Sarah’s satirical eye panning the love and guilt, bullying and bitchiness that make up family life. She has her own ax to grind: husband Sam has been cheating on her. Grandma’s will is the dramatic high point: she wants her ashes scattered in Scotland. Scotland! Edna has never even been out of state but gamely volunteers to go; Sarah will accompany her (she needs a respite from Sam). Before they leave, taking Grandpa’s ashes too, Edna has a surprise of her own: she is going to marry James Laurent, an elderly blind black man who canes chairs. The scenes of these aging lovebirds have a haunting delicacy, but then it’s off to Scotland, where the ashes are spread at three different sites, and the satirical edge gives way to Edna’s grief and Sarah’s agonizing over Sam. The mood becomes even more somber with Edna’s revelation that she’s dying from pancreatic cancer. The final section, back in Fort Worth, feels rushed: there’s Edna’s tenderly offbeat wedding to James, a further revelation (this time to the police) about Grandma’s death, and then Edna’s own demise.
Coomer’s canvas is too crowded. He does Scotland proud, but at the expense of the family rearranging itself back home—which is where the novel lives. Still, an enjoyable read, without a dull page.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-55597-385-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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 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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