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On Woodward

As the Great Depression pummels the United States, a Kentucky family moves to Detroit to start a new life in Van Haren’s debut novel.
Alma Combs’ father, Chet, works in a coal mine that’s had one too many accidents. After the latest scare, he decides it’s time to move his family up north; he knows a man who found a job in a factory there, and is sure he’ll be able to do the same. Alma, who shares a special bond with her father, is sad to leave the mountains where they dreamed of having a farm someday, but she’s also excited to see Detroit. As an aspiring artist, she’s bitten by the big-city bug almost immediately, and she’s enamored of Detroit’s soaring architecture, well-dressed socialites and beautiful paintings at the art institute. Obsessed with leaving her “hillbilly” image behind, Alma fixates on beauty and refinement, and is embarrassed by her mother’s old-fashioned, spendthrift ways. The novel follows Alma and the other members of the Combs family as they attempt to weather difficult times, each encountering their own personal demons. Soon the story, as seen mostly through Alma’s eyes, moves from the depths of the Depression into the booming era of World War II. The author effectively shows not just the outward effects of the changing economy, but its emotional toll as well, and as Alma leaves her childhood innocence behind and attempts to become a great artist, she becomes a study in contradictions. Van Haren skillfully creates a protagonist who’s not likable per se, but certainly redeemable, and very much a product of her times. Alma’s growth as a person, and her engaging relationship with her family, keep the novel whizzing along. That said, the story hits a few predictable notes and sometimes veers away from more serious moral issues, such as a possible connection between Alma’s patron and the Nazis. However, the majority of the novel looks hard at Alma’s missteps, and paints a full portrait of her struggle for the American Dream.

A conventional but often pleasurable look at a family during a turning point in American history.

Pub Date: March 21, 2014

ISBN: 978-1458210500

Page Count: 450

Publisher: AbbottPress

Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2014

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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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