Sharp storytelling augments this novel of single-minded perseverance.
An old man recounts his youthful struggles in this winding novel set in New Bern, North Carolina.
Joshua Jordan may be old, and though his life wasn’t easy, he lived a full one. Born just after the Civil War, Joshua, who’s African-American, was born a free man—the first in his family. After his parents died of cholera, his uncle Levi took him in. Levi works for a surly plantation owner, Captain Bigly, and when 12-year-old Joshua rushes through a job on the plantation, resulting in an accident that leaves Captain Bigley’s daughter, Melinda Mae, in a coma. Joshua goes looking for the Swamp Woman, a local healer, who eventually heals the girl. Seeing the power of the Swamp Woman, Joshua wants to treat patients, too, but he soon finds that the road to becoming a doctor is much harder than he thought. His education is subpar, he doesn’t have money, benefactors abandon him, he faces extreme discrimination, and yet...Joshua still works toward his ultimate goal of practicing medicine. Old Joshua soon realizes that his life isn’t over—there is still another chapter (or even two!) to come. Dempsey (The Butterfly, 2017, etc.) is a keen and ferocious storyteller. Frequent flashbacks guide readers toward the satisfying scene of Joshua’s epiphany. The prose is lush and fulfilling: “I missed my own country, flat and sandy, but filled with pines, magnolias, cypress and live oaks hung with moss. I missed the fields covered with cotton plants, plump with the snow-white puffs of cotton waiting to be picked.” As Joshua recounts his past, it motivates him to encourage youngsters to realize their own purposes. Readers may feel similarly inspired. Though the included illustrations aren’t needed, they add texture.
Sharp storytelling augments this novel of single-minded perseverance.Pub Date: May 14, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4907-7295-0
Page Count: 158
Publisher: Trafford
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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