A first novel (``rescued from the slush pile,''we're told) with attitude to spare but nothing else: the story of a self- absorbed, self-destructive woman who screws up her life only to be saved by a good man. Like many of her contemporary literary peers, 30-year-old Eleanor Shank, commonly known as Bean, has a long list of people to blame for the mess she's in. Naturally, it begins with Mom, a promiscuous lush, and Dad, a surly authoritarian. Nothing really tragic has happened to Bean, but the scale of injury or awareness of a world beyond her navel is not important as she decides to find herself by leaving Boston and heading west. Bean's traveling light, but with lots of emotional baggage: She's just ended a long affair with an unfaithful alcoholic; she's never gotten over her parents' divorce or her stepfather's death; and along the way, she's also had two abortions. Bean takes a camera on the trip (she has vague ambitions of becoming a photographer) and, straining to be cool and witty, tells her own story with strident verve, alternating memories of the past with accounts of the actual journey and of the menall bad choicesshe's slept with. Her first stop is Richmond, Virginia, where she visits Dad, whom she blames for much of her unhappiness; then en route to Albuquerque she meets up with an old high-school crush, Joe, who's gay. In Tucson, she quarrels with her mother, who's sleeping with Ricky, Bean's old boyfriend. In El Paso, she moves in with Ash, who might be the father of the child she discovers she's carrying. Finally, she ends up in Oregon, helping Joe run his coffee shop while waiting for the baby's birth. A marriage proposal and a place to show her photos make up for all the previous messy living. A one-dimensional take on a terminally self-preoccupied woman.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8118-1989-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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