A complicated yet convincing story of good and evil that keeps the preaching to a minimum, the suspense to the extreme.
In Keenan’s (The Origin and Applicability of Fighter Tactics, 1986) epic tale, a retired fighter pilot and football star, now an accomplished actor, returns to the town of his youth to seek answers and perhaps right wrongs of the past. But he’d better hurry: he only has one day to live.
Bishop Healey is having the worst day of his life. His balancing of faith and malevolence is challenged when boyhood friend Jack Cochran arrives and demands absolution years after killing his abusive father, a crime for which another man was punished. After meeting with Healey, Cochran undergoes life-threatening surgery and begins to tie up loose ends, finding enough rope to hang himself as well as a few others. As the secrets of numerous misplaced patrimonies are revealed and church abuses described, it soon becomes clear why others in search of justice or revenge also want an audience with his eminence. Healey knows where the bodies are buried and who put them there. In Keenan’s novel, the Catholic Church is taken to task on many accounts, but the flogging is never a penance for the reader. Moral temptations and mitigating arguments are as complicated as anything in John Gregory Dunne’s True Confessions, and while this book stretches for the scope of Michener with flashbacks and back story, Keenan masterfully keeps the focus on men and women under stress. Readers see Cochran’s rough and tumble past and his career in Vietnam and how those events influenced him; unfortunately, we seeing nothing of his career as an award-winning actor, a garden that could have provided a rich harvest of iniquity. The narrative relies almost entirely on dialogue, which speeds exposition but does little to allow the world to be seen through the eyes of its characters.
A complicated yet convincing story of good and evil that keeps the preaching to a minimum, the suspense to the extreme.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-5025-8664-3
Page Count: 410
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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