A quick, enjoyable read that doesn’t spend too much time in the rough.
Clark offers a novel about golf, race and friendship in roughly equal parts.
When Aloysius “Wish” Fitzgerald and Jackson Spears meet in 1969, they form an unlikely friendship. Wish is poor and black, and Jackson is rich and white. They bond over golf; Wish is obsessed with the sport, and Jackson’s overbearing father hopes his son will be able to master it. Wish works as a caddy to stay close to the game, at a time when most courses wouldn’t allow black players, due to the racism of people like Jackson’s father. Wish helps Jackson not only with his golf game, but also with his confidence. It’s a favor that Jackson repays later in life, as the narrative moves through roughly four decades of family, business and sports struggles and triumphs. Race and racism is a recurring theme, but it’s never an issue between any of the primary characters. Jackson’s father, for example, is a bit of a cartoonish bigot, but Clark doggedly avoids giving him and similar antagonists a major role in the story. Instead, they’re on the fringe as Wish pursues his dream of becoming a professional golfer. The narrative tension refreshingly comes from the characters chasing their dreams, or from their refusal to let go of their own stubborn notions. On the other hand, the story’s moral lessons are at times overly simplistic, as characters relinquish those same stubborn notions after some quick dialogue and reflection. Race is a difficult issue, but Clark handles it broadly, never letting the story get too gritty or thorny. He keeps his characters amiable and self-reliant, and although each decade presents them with challenges, their lives never seem in danger of spiraling out of control. Even so, it’s easy to root for Wish, and this fact keeps the story moving along. The golf jargon may get a bit thick for non-golfers at times, but it’s always necessary to the action and detailed enough to please golf fans.
A quick, enjoyable read that doesn’t spend too much time in the rough.Pub Date: March 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-1493783137
Page Count: 428
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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