Difficult, dark, and uncompromisingly fine.
A somber, haunting debut novel from Irish poet Hardie about a world-weary, financially desperate woman who seeks security for herself and her son by marrying an elderly Anglo-Irish farmer.
Born in Java of mixed parentage, cold-blooded, mercenary Hannie has always lived off men. But her looks are fading with middle age, and she’s penniless after her most recent failed marriage. So Hannie leaves Africa for England, where she meets and marries Ned, a former journalist and world traveler now retired to a farm in the Irish countryside of his youth. They enter marriage pragmatically: Ned wants a companion; Hannie needs financial support and a home for herself and 14-year-old Joss. But once ensconced on Ned’s farm, Hannie feels excruciatingly isolated and unhappy, while Ned is crushed by her unwillingness to reach out to his Anglo-Irish friends and family. To make matter worse, Joss (who arrives from Africa shortly after the marriage) is a deeply troubled boy, possibly psychopathic. Hannie senses the inexorable pull toward disaster as Joss spends more and more time with Ned’s tenant, a lovely and innocent would-be artist named Niamh. The author slowly and relentlessly probes her characters’ psyches: Hannie’s seeming amorality covers a deep sense of loyalty; Ned’s growing love for his wife collides with his sense of social duty; Joss is both unreachable and heartbreakingly needy. Notable among the equally complex cast of supporting characters is Ned’s housekeeper Mrs. Coady, Hannie’s unlikely soulmate, who understands maternal passion because she has lost a child of her own. Tensions build as secrets are half-revealed, but ultimately this elusive novel defies easy summary because so much of the plot occurs in the smallest details and between the lines. Hardie allows no sentimentality or easy conclusion. Despite the reader’s early assumptions about who is moral and who is not, in the end it is Hannie who must forgive Ned’s betrayal.
Difficult, dark, and uncompromisingly fine.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2002
ISBN: 0-316-07622-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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