by Larry Watson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 25, 2007
The soft-focus ending is only a momentary respite from the novel’s preoccupation—the persistent, agonizing allure of the...
A writer scours the past and his own false starts in an ultimately futile quest to explain the 1961 assassination of a charismatic North Dakota legislator.
In his latest return to the Northern plains, Watson (Orchard, 2003, etc.) flouts the taboo against writer protagonists, no doubt in the interests of structure. Musing over a compendium of his earlier attempts to explicate the central drama of his life, the nameless writer-narrator recalls a January Wednesday in Bismarck, 1961, when he walked home from high school with his best friend, Gene Stoddard. At Gene’s house, Gene’s father Ray has, uncharacteristically, returned early from his job as a state employee at the nearby North Dakota capitol building. The narrator later learns that Ray shot, point-blank at the capitol, his own boyhood friend Monty Burnham, a state senator with Washington ambitions, then hurried home to hang himself in the family garage, leaving behind a confession to the crime but no inkling as to motive. Approaching the incident from the points of view of both pivotal and peripheral players, the narrator dispenses creative writing tips and quotes stories he’s published in obscure literary journals. Several speculative vendetta scenarios emerge. Monty and Alma, Ray’s beautiful wife, were high-school sweethearts, and rekindled an affair after her marriage, possibly during World War II, possibly during a high-school reunion, casting doubt on the paternity of the Stoddards’ daughter. Monty bamboozled Ray’s dying father into selling a beloved lake cabin, depriving Ray of his inheritance. Monty embroiled Ray, who works in purchasing, in a kickback scheme involving the state auto fleet, a scandal on the brink of exposure. Although everyone else, including his parents, has put the trauma to rest, the narrator has not. His obsession is complicated by his estrangement from Gene, and his (lifelong) infatuation with Gene’s girlfriend, Marie.
The soft-focus ending is only a momentary respite from the novel’s preoccupation—the persistent, agonizing allure of the unknowable.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-375-50722-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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