A short debut novel with plenty of sparkle and flash but little substance. The New Zealand-born Gunn, a CondÇ Nast freelancer now living in London, speaks in the voice of Janey, a child entrusted to care for her little brother (nicknamed ``Jim Little'' by their mother, ``because I'll never let you grow'') while her parents live in drunken glamour by a lake. That's about all of the plot. Gunn relies on image after image to relate those days of freedom, and sometimes danger, but the effectiveness of the images is split about 50-50. Moreover, the childlike voice is too precious, simultaneously all-knowing and stingy with the small pieces of plot it does leak out. The relationship between Jim Little and Janey, who is seven years his senior, is an unlikely one, both because it is so chummy and because she is so reverent of him. ``He shook his head away when I wanted to place my hand on his silky hair, feel how warm it was, how it smelled of sunshine and sand and clean water. `I'm not a girl.' '' He also sounds surprisingly prissy at times, as when the two are fantasizing about what they would like for dinner: `` `I imagine some toast,' said Jim Little. `Perhaps I imagine it. With jam. Perhaps with chocolate spready and jam.' '' Some of the weakest writing is about the duo's mother, who is presented as a beautiful chimera who lavishes love on Jim but remains out of reach. ``We're their living, heaving seed,'' Janey laments in one particularly overwrought passage. Still, even if all the writing here were up to the standards of the best sections, like Janey's discussion of how children's books about kids going wild have planted the idea in her head that she and her brother might live outside on the beach permanently, it would still tax one's patience with its coy resistance to presenting anything openly. Like a sun-shower, this is fleeting and leaves no mark. (First serial to Grand Street; author tour)
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-87113-592-2
Page Count: 104
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
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 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
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