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JASON AND MEDEIA

John Gardner is a writer of great energy and intellectual inventiveness, saturated in an imagination addicted to myth, mostly the existential sort, man creating his own myths about the self, about order, about love, as the world surrounding him falls to pieces, becomes increasingly chaotic or mindless or threatening. This preoccupation with modern man doggedly affirming his humanity as History goes awry was strikingly effective in The Sunlight Dialogues, a large, roomy, emotion-charged allegory, a kaleidoscope of the changing features of small-town American life in the mid-'60's, a redoubtable work notable for its philosophical debates and the canny verisimilitude with which Gardner can endow characters and events. Not surprisingly, this novel has suddenly made everyone aware of the young author's powerful talents. Jason and Medeia, a retelling of this gory legend of destiny and defiance, of man as a cunning upstart and woman as a vengeful sorceress, of dragons' teeth and fire-breathing bulls, is impressive too in its bookish, pseudo-Homeric way, but, finally, seems rather overblown, unwisely incantatory, synthetic. The familiar actors tend to speak like those toplofty Victorian translations from the Greek dramatists; the descriptive passages evoke the kind of stage directions Ibsen was wont to mock, and the spangled adventures on and off the Argo — scenes of "evil deeds," scenes "seismic in love and wrath" — project, in the end, little cumulative force. The concluding moments of betrayal and carnage, which we remember from Ovid or Euripedes, send a few classic shivers down the reader's spine. But in all of Gardner's fancy talk there's really not one phrase that matches "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned," nor anything, in his unwieldy pageants, approaching, say, the shapely sophistication Andre Gide brought to Theseus. Perhaps, after all, encounters with antiquity are better left to Europeans.

Pub Date: June 1, 1973

ISBN: 0394740602

Page Count: 531

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: March 29, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1973

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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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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

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

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

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