Gritty characters solidify an intelligent story and an abstract concept.
Various culprits—linked in numerous ways—become involved in murder and other illicit deeds in this debut literary/crime novel.
In 2044, Geena Nuss gets word that one of her parents is dead. The story then hops back 60 years, when Geena’s mother, Beth Sturgess, is living as a drug-addled prostitute. She escapes the life with help from Massachusetts stripper Joe Tink, who gets her a job aboard a boat. But that vessel takes her to Bermuda, where she ultimately lives with a man who, according to locals, is a slave owner and rapist. Other characters gradually enter—and re-enter—the narrative, from Beth’s eventual husband, Kevin Nuss, who’s a cop, to Joe’s lover Martin Case, a math professor. Some have multiple connections: Ellen McKinnon meets Martin at a hotel bar, but she has ties to individuals in other, surprising ways. Nearly everyone has a dark past, including someone seeking revenge and another who’s a serial killer. By the mid-21st century, Geena is alone, her family members either dead or living elsewhere. Trying to reunite with an old friend and her estranged brother, Davis, she may soon learn the essential part that physics has played in everybody’s lives. Danenbarger excels at developing characters, which considerably benefits a story of intersecting lives. Some backstories as well as the players themselves are unsettling or unsavory, though they never fail to engage. But the best moments are the links among characters via encounters and unexpected relationships. These even induce suspense: Successive chapter titles cite a “Friday” of impending doom, with a car wreck, which Kevin witnesses, that’s bound to involve established characters. While the author astutely describes quantum entanglement as a possible reason for the interconnected characters, he wisely keeps the titular concept ambiguous and the ending wide open. Nevertheless, the novel’s timeline is, in a few instances, perplexing. For example, Geena is “in her fifties” in 2044, but her parents meet in 1997; and Beth refers to a quarter century as “several years.”
Gritty characters solidify an intelligent story and an abstract concept.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-578-55503-4
Page Count: 380
Publisher: StormBlock Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2019
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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