Frenetic violence aside: a sweetly redemptive if strained tale of heroism, faith, and rough justice.
Second-novelist Harris brings back characters from his Civil War–set Delirium of the Brave (1999), this time serving up a slew of Nazi spies, IRA agents, voodoo practitioners, religious mystics, and upper-crust locals—all of whose interactions too adroitly lead to one good man’s triumph.
It’s now the 1930s, and young Irish priest Michael Mulvaney arrives in Savannah, an IRA killer turned seminarian. Mulvaney has repented his ways, unlike fellow IRA member Francis Quinn, who in 1942 agrees to spy for the Nazis in return for guns for the IRA. Trained in Germany, Quinn demonstrates his loyalty by cold-bloodedly killing a Jewish prisoner in front of a young Jewish girl. Dropped from a submarine off the coast of Georgia, he kills his two handlers after they put him ashore, then makes his way to the McQueen shipyard, where he befriends the owner’s son Jimmy. When Jimmy joins up, so does Francis, having expediently changed sides after bumping off his local handler so he won’t be betrayed. After the war, Jimmy marries and has son Will , whose story now becomes our focus. Francis, along with two black voodoo practitioners who live on nearby Jesus Island, where the McQueens have a house, feel protective of Will, who’s destined for great things. Born with a harelip, Will endures surgery, military school, the loss of his legs in Vietnam, then, once home, goes into politics with his father’s blessing and Francis’s support. When a sunken German submarine is found with documents and photos of Francis in its safe, a mean-spirited enemy of Will’s obtains copies and gets ready to destroy Will’s career in Congress with the revelations of his old friend Francis’s past. Will is innocent and decent, though, so the forces of good rally to keep him safe for democracy—thanks to the serendipitous help of an alligator and some vengeful hoods.
Frenetic violence aside: a sweetly redemptive if strained tale of heroism, faith, and rough justice.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-26980-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2002
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 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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