In this gentle tale, Strong (Ourselves, 1971) inhabits the mind and body of a working-class Italian-American woman from the slums of Boston to tell of her awakening to the realities of politics, poverty, and child abuse—as well as to the transformative power of love. Nearly 30 years old, Barbara Orsini finally moves out of her parents' house and into her own apartment in the working-class Boston district of Stinted Common. She is just a few shabby blocks from the street where she grew up as the fat, endearing baby of a close-knit Italian-American family, yet she finds herself in a turbulent new world. First, there is Paul, a chubby black man from ``Saint something in the West Indies'' who talks like an Oxford don. Paul fills Barbara with a sense of familiarity yet mystery, and she records the way he talks in an offbeat running journal: ``Yesterday morning going to work I wrote on the corner of the shelter of my bus stop but on purpose one of his sentences which he said on my way out the door: It's not likely to be a terribly pleasant day I fear.'' In addition to her budding relationship with Paul, Barbara works as the receptionist at the local counseling center, a job that thrusts her into contact with troubled people from impoverished and oppressed countries around the world. Here, she learns that troubled people—even her own nephew, a battered child—don't change much. In the end, Barbara's simple but truthful observations enhance her confidence enough to let her take to the streets to save the counseling center. Finally, too, she finds the inner freedom it takes to describe her great love for Paul to her bigoted Italian mother. Strong's warmhearted heroine and her family wobble in and out of focus, but her slow blossoming is nonetheless as true and satisfying as fresh bread
Pub Date: April 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-944072-19-4
Page Count: 230
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1992
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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