An unforgettable kid narrates this cracked, acerbic novel.
Young Zoe charms all in Van Middlesworth’s debut novel about a very dysfunctional clan.
Van Middlesworth gives her readers a memorable cast. Zoe King is a tough, scarily perceptive kid through whose eyes we take in the story. “Knife” is her punk Revlon Doll who rides in her holster and gives advice. She is protective of her little brother, Willy, who is addled but a genius of sorts. “Daddy Dead” and “Mother Blind” tells us what Zoe thinks of her parents—Daddy is especially no bargain—and then there is “Aunt Oink,” Mother Blind’s younger sister, whom Daddy impregnates. He divorces Mother Blind, marries Oink, then splits after their baby, Zuzu, falls to her death out a window. And this is just a small sampling of the characters and the chaos they generate. Things are a bit hard to follow because we are never sure what really happens and what—like an impromptu flight to Paris—comes from Zoe’s surreal imagination. We watch Zoe grow up while trying to deal with all this. Eventually she gets into enough trouble that she winds up in The New Jersey Training School for Girls (one of only three white girls there, an eye-opener). After a year or so, she earns parole. The End. Call it a story of survival. Van Middlesworth, a much published writer, has undeniable gifts. Zoe is wise and naïve and mesmerizing. Startling lines and imagery are on every page: “I want to shrink into my hand and run down all the paths on my palm.” Zuzu’s death causes “something invisible like a blade of sad slicing us together.” There is love here, but hardly the tidy Hallmark kind. Zoe is a kid who works with what she’s got, having little choice. No surprise, she dreams of getting a pilot’s license. Maybe she will. We hope she will. And fly away with Willy.
An unforgettable kid narrates this cracked, acerbic novel.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-947175-11-2
Page Count: 322
Publisher: Serving House Books
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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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