Stellar fiction about hard living during the Depression.
Fitzjerrell’s (The Dividing Season, 2012) engaging tale depicts a Texas town during the Great Depression.
Mike Lemay was recently hired by the Federal Writers Project to interview and write about the people suffering in this hard time. He himself feels guilty for leaving his surviving family in North Carolina, but he needs whatever work he can get so he can send money home. He winds up in Cooperville, Texas, and immediately confronts the mysterious disappearance of the town eccentric and loner, Effie Beck. After renting quarters with the Travises—widowed Cora Mae and daughter Jodean—Mike is quickly drawn in. Cora Mae, with her chronic headaches, is a classic manipulator, and everyone seems to see Jodean as a good daughter but damaged goods. Why? And does that somehow involve Effie Beck? Such questions form the backbone of the novel as Mike and Jodean fall in love slowly, warily, predictably. Groups and minor characters pop in throughout the story. Though the town is suspicious of any outsiders, a crew from the Works Progress Administration is building a bridge over the Medina River—a bridge that, at book’s climax, might be washed away. The menacing sheriff and his beautiful wife (aka the richest couple in town) contribute a subplot, and the historically factual “orphan train” plays a major role. The story is as much about Mike’s coming to terms with himself and his disgust at the Depression and his situation as it is about his solving the mystery of Effie Beck. Fitzjerrell packs a lot in, and her pacing is impressive. Characters are real and detailed, and the town feels like a real place, not a stage. Small wonder that the book already won the Will Rogers Gold Medallion.
Stellar fiction about hard living during the Depression.Pub Date: July 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-0984776818
Page Count: 250
Publisher: WKMA Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
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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