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THE BOOK OF COLOR

From the author of the recently acclaimed biography Daisy Bates in the Desert (1994) comes a first novel of beauty and accomplishment, its subject of racial fear and intolerance drawn from Blackburn's own family history. The story is a saga of guilt and suffering that has its start late in the 19th century when a missionary from England comes to an island near Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean, ``to stamp out copulation'' (as his son later puts it). What he actually stamps out, however, is the happiness of his family and descendants: The first victim is his own wife, whom he drives cruelly to madness after discovering her having sex with an island native; then there's his own guilt-driven son, suspected of having black blood, who nevertheless echoes his father by taking up a repressive ministry and returning to England; and finally, there's his son, who carries the family's color-guilt and madness deep into the 20th century. The tale itself, however, is only the skeleton of sorrow upon which Blackburn hangs the woven beauties of her own telling of it. Every bit as important as what things happen when are the author's wondrous shifts in time and her deft and inventive intertwinings of image, symbol, and character as they do. Imagine a narrator going into a house in the company of a rather friendly pig; coming upon the narrator's astonishingly old grandfather there; then sitting under a table with the pig as it casually eats a leatherbound book. From one recurring detail to another (the pigor one like it, in earlier timeis the lonely grandfather's boyhood pet), Blackburn evokes the world of 19th-century Mauritius, of 20th-century England, and the terrible sorrows of repression, loneliness, slavery, madness, and lossall with a deftness, confidence, and magic that, by making it joyful, raise tragedy to its uttermost. A rare, wonderful achievement in the novel.

Pub Date: Sept. 12, 1995

ISBN: 0-679-43983-8

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995

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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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