A first novel from Trinidadian-born James (the story collection Jumping Ship, 1992) that turns the coming-of-age of a young Caribbean woman into a disturbing fable—one that movingly evokes the loss of innocence in a lush tropical demi-paradise. James again displays his lyrical gifts in a story that makes the island setting as palpable a presence as his protagonist, young Uxann. Uxann, innocent and dutiful, lives with her father, Seyeh, on a small farm outside the local village. Her mother went off with another man, and now Seyeh carefully protects Uxann from worldly influence. Uxann, a diligent and accomplished student at the local convent, delights in studying, taking care of the farm animals, and keeping house for her beloved father. But it is inevitable—her classmates are already falling in love, getting pregnant, and having to drop-out—that Uxann's innocence cannot endure. In a series of sometimes less-than-credible twists and turns of plot, Uxann painfully and then tragically is expelled from Eden into a horrifying world where old secrets are revealed and new disasters wreak havoc. Her father arranges for her school-friend Keah to help with the housework to earn money against a debt her family owes; Uxann's initial reservations are overcome by her pleasure in having company in the house. But sexually experienced Keah, the designated serpent in the story, soon seduces Uxann's father; Uxann finds out, and in despair gets drunk, which leads to her being unknowingly— and unconvincingly—impregnated by her equally drunk father. A son is born, and Uxann, noting the resemblance to her father, is driven to madness and murder. ``The natural order,'' the routine of the farm, will be her only comfort. A stunning tragedy of carefully calibrated horror and pulsating sensuality that is more a tropical murder of the innocents that a conventional rites-of-passage novel.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-679-42409-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1993
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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