While the endings to these life lessons aren't always happy or particularly provocative for an adult audience, they do have...
Seven predictable yet tender tales of growing up in America.
Doble's first collection of short stories presents a number of boy-next-door protagonists trying to wrest their way into adulthood in the face of adversity both common and rare. The volume starts off with Lefty, an African-American pitching prodigy from the projects, and concludes with several years in the life of Skipper Bitwell, white, middle-class, fatherless and painfully smart. The themes of alienation and angst breed throughout, and more than one story's plot gets blown just a few pages in by heavy-handed foreshadowing: "Maybe they weren't all serious and levelheaded like Lefty; but they weren't bad kids. At least not then." But along the way, Doble's experiments with narrative voice–ranging from an uneducated bread-truck driver, to epistolary revelation from the battlefield in Vietnam, to "Skipper Bitwell's Journal"–often succeed. The latter tale includes the brief but touching reminiscence of Skipper watching late-night Sherlock Holmes flicks with his father while eating peanut butter and crackers; this homey image typifies the whole of a collection largely comprised of scenes both familiar and local. The work's shortest piece, "The Accordion's Greatest Hits," which charts the transformation of affection from the budding of new love to the onset of ennui, also proves to be an engrossing tale–understated character development leads readers to ponder the very nature of attraction and consider how the same mysteries of character that initially drew one to a beloved may, if left unsolved, drive one away. Other stories, while often describing time spent with various therapists, end up being less psychologically probing.
While the endings to these life lessons aren't always happy or particularly provocative for an adult audience, they do have much to offer a teenaged readership encountering similar tribulations.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 0-9741516-2-9
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
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 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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