A powerfully written exploration of the rites of power.
Ugokwe’s debut novella adds a mystical touch to the story of a destructive, dysfunctional marriage.
Pallavi Victoria, known to her friends and family as P.V., came to Los Angeles to find freedom from her rich, conservative Trinidadian family in Miami. Instead, she fell in love with a handsome player named Rodney and, at the age of 22, got married. To Rodney’s “twelve grinning and good-times-ready groomsmen,” P.V.’s a figure of fun, referred to as Boozhe P, short for bourgeoisie princess. To her face, Rodney calls her Wifey—when he’s not demeaning her with other epithets. Despite bruises and scars and her mother’s warning—“dat young man can’t love you!”— P.V. tries to make the best of their new, downsized life in Texas, a move imposed upon her by Rodney. As he falls into drink and drugs, she makes friends with Juanita and Georgina, who, with their caring husbands and numerous children, demonstrate a better way of life. With their encouragement, P.V. pursues her love of cooking by throwing regular dinner parties while her husband is out carousing with his friends. When Rodney returns one night and finds P.V. a little too close to a handsome guest, their frayed relationship enters into a final showdown. Ugokwe’s existential tale of a woman reduced to a “thingified concept” in a marriage mired in machismo begins promisingly, and its themes of materialism running amok, misogyny and racial tensions are timely. The writing is bold and unconventional. Characters are well-defined through dialect and dialogue as the narrator switches from Rodney’s California vernacular to the pidgin English P.V.’s mother speaks over the phone to the g-dropping drawl of the Dallas suburbs. Despite this, P.V. never seems to come to life. She wants freedom but never strives for it. As conflict rages around her, she reacts passively, as when confronted in dreams by her deceased “Nani,” whose “antiquated deference and quiet defiance” she never quite shakes.
A powerfully written exploration of the rites of power.Pub Date: March 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-0615764900
Page Count: 154
Publisher: Pink Purse International
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2013
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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