A haunting story of guilt, denial and the possibility of demonic possession.
A psychological thriller that keeps the reader on edge until the last page.
With occasional echoes of The Exorcist, this debut novel concerns the therapy of George Davies, who must come to terms with what he suffered as a child before he can function as a father. The 30-year-old Davies has a phobia that prevents him from holding his newborn son, thus threatening his previously happy marriage. Seeking the help of a psychiatrist, to whom this first-person narrative is addressed, George reveals that he had undergone therapy 19 years earlier, because of experiences that he has done his best to repress and would plainly prefer not to revisit. Yet he agrees to recount whatever he can remember in a series of notebooks, which constitute most of this novel’s chapters. He details the torment he endured after the death of his father, who had become ill on a humanitarian mission to Honduras. The death leaves the 11-year-old George not only fatherless but friendless, as his schoolmates turn on him with insinuations that there was some scandal surrounding his father. An apparition visits the boy, one that might be a psychological projection of George’s darker side, might be a demon, might be an imaginary (or not-so-imaginary) friend. The Friend (as George refers to him) pushes the boy toward revelations about not only his father’s death, but about his parents’ marriage. Though both academics, George’s parents held very different views on religion, with his father feeling that the devil was a palpably real presence who must be battled while his mother remained more of a modern rationalist, dismissing her husband’s beliefs as superstition. Whether the cause is psychological or spiritual, George as a boy becomes involved in a series of strange calamities that suggest he should be institutionalized. The adult George ultimately realizes that he can’t be a father until he resolves his boyhood mystery.
A haunting story of guilt, denial and the possibility of demonic possession.Pub Date: May 22, 2007
ISBN: 0-307-35122-X
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Shaye Areheart/Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2007
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
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
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