Australian Leigh’s capable, disquieting debut is an homage of sorts to Moby Dick as an accomplished killer coolly stalks his prey—a Tasmanian tiger that’s the last of its breed—but is rattled when long-dormant emotions are stirred by a fractured family he encounters.
Arriving incognito at the edge of the Tasmanian bush to begin his hunt, the cold fish known as “M” immediately encounters a distraction from his mission. Two unrestrained children, a girl and her younger brother, are the welcoming committee in the house where he’s to stay between forays into the wilderness, their mother in a drugged stupor from mourning her scientist husband, who vanished months before in the same area where M will go. At first M has no time for the kids and tackles his assignment—to find and kill the tiger in order to retrieve genetic material and body parts for a biotech outfit—with the icy calm of a perfectionist, trapping and shooting and skinning creatures as it suits him. As time passes, however, his target remains elusive, and visits to base camp expose him further to each member of the family, with the result that he becomes more involved in their lives and aware of their needs. Called away on another mission without having bagged his cat, M returns after some weeks to finish the job, actually anticipating his reunion with the family. But he finds only an empty house and a trail of tragedy. Hopes of human intimacy, flawed though it might have been, now dashed, he resumes his cold-blooded ways in competition with park rangers who are also in search of the tiger, until the moment he has so long awaited arrives.
Not exactly a tale of redemption, and in fact the pervasive bleakness and chilling details of the hunt flatten the dimensions of the story somewhat, but within its obsessive vision there is power, raw and formidable. A writer to watch.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-56858-169-6
Page Count: 176
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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The years pass by at a fast and steamy clip in Blume’s latest adult novel (Wifey, not reviewed; Smart Women, 1984) as two friends find loyalties and affections tested as they grow into young women. In sixth grade, when Victoria Weaver is asked by new girl Caitlin Somers to spend the summer with her on Martha’s Vineyard, her life changes forever. Victoria, or more commonly Vix, lives in a small house; her brother has muscular dystrophy; her mother is unhappy, and money is scarce. Caitlin, on the other hand, lives part of the year with her wealthy mother Phoebe, who’s just moved to Albuquerque, and summers with her father Lamb, equally affluent, on the Vineyard. The story of how this casual invitation turns the two girls into what they call "Summer sisters" is prefaced with a prologue in which Vix is asked by Caitlin to be her matron of honor. The years in between are related in brief segments by numerous characters, but mostly by Vix. Caitlin, determined never to be ordinary, is always testing the limits, and in adolescence falls hard for Von, an older construction worker, while Vix falls for his friend Bru. Blume knows the way kids and teens speak, but her two female leads are less credible as they reach adulthood. After high school, Caitlin travels the world and can’t understand why Vix, by now at Harvard on a scholarship and determined to have a better life than her mother has had, won’t drop out and join her. Though the wedding briefly revives Vix’s old feelings for Bru, whom Caitlin is marrying, Vix is soon in love with Gus, another old summer friend, and a more compatible match. But Caitlin, whose own demons have been hinted at, will not be so lucky. The dark and light sides of friendship breathlessly explored in a novel best saved for summer beachside reading.
Pub Date: May 8, 1998
ISBN: 0-385-32405-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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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. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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