A grim narrative, but hard to put down.
English newcomer Trigell offers a chilling, heavily moralistic tale tracing the hopes pinned on a juvenile ex-con to make good.
Boy A is the legal moniker given to a teenager who was tried, along with another boy labeled Boy B, for the sensational murder of a young girl in his hometown of Luton, England, then given the chance for a new identity after ten years in prison. Boy A, now a young man who chooses the name of Jack Burridge, tries out his secret new identity with the help of a benevolent probation officer, Uncle Terry, who has found Jack a place to stay and a job in a new town. Years of trying to fit into the brutal hierarchy of prisons at Brentwood and Feltham have alienated Jack to the real world, and he eases into his job as a driver’s map-reader, befriending his colleagues, who continually tempt him into trouble, drink and drugs, while he begins a relationship with a fast lady at the job who proves his undoing. Jack is a very likable character, nicknamed Bruiser (after a bar brawl), and Trigell follows him by going back in time, using an alphabeticized table of contents (“A Is for Apple,” “B Is for Boy”), to the boy’s youth, being bullied by other boys, dropping out of school and befriending the ruffian Boy B, the events leading up to the murder of the pretty young Angela Milton. Trigell’s mission is to elicit sympathy for Jack, who seems too bewildered and naïve to be guilty, and who never feels secure, knowing that he can never fit in. Meanwhile, the news of Boy A’s reentry into the world emerges in the papers, and Jack fears being ceaselessly pursued by a society bent on retribution rather than rehabilitation. Trigell wisely eschews the usual kind of unruly vernacular here in favor of an articulate, paternalistic narrator who truly wishes Jack well.
A grim narrative, but hard to put down.Pub Date: May 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-85242-859-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Serpent’s Tail
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
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
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
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