An atmospheric ride, brief but realized, with a sure, discomforting hand at portent and a quicksilver administration of the...
Otherworldly happenings are afoot when a Native American shaman withdraws from his calling in Mogan’s novel.
A butte rises 300 feet out of the soft-sand desert of the American Southwest. At its scorching foot sits a weather station where Tom has taken meteorological readings for the past six years, and where the Weather Bureau has posted Robin, a recent college graduate. Robin is a woman and a tad defensive in the male-dominated world of the service, but anxious to make her mark at a post that most people shun as too brutally desolate. Tom unnerves her at first, a calm but reticent gentleman who has a line of Navajo seers in his blood, though he has distanced himself from that life. He has an uncanny talent for describing the land during his weather reports; these can be somewhat fruity—“The east and west are like the edges of a giant ladle in which the liquid energy of the light pours”—but more frequently sharp in the mind’s eye: “As the sun sinks lower, each grain of sand casts a shadow on the next.” In writing that echoes the milieu—sere, elemental (“the moon was full—daylight without depth”) and touched with an ominous foreboding, like a bad omen sits just over the horizon—Tom encourages Robin, who is both drawn to the desert and finds it ungraspable, to meld with the land, invite it inside her and give herself over to it. As they grow more at ease with one another, and despite the strange episodes in the nighttime when Tom sleepwalks and Robin sees apocalyptic reflections in his fixed stare, they explore the butte together, there to find both the sacred and the profane, and to unleash a force from deepest history that will be their undoing.
An atmospheric ride, brief but realized, with a sure, discomforting hand at portent and a quicksilver administration of the surreal.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4251-6975-6
Page Count: 130
Publisher: Trafford
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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