While many will appreciate Greenlaw’s intimate portrayal of Mary’s life, the focus here is diffused by less-clearly-realized...
A teenaged girl’s coming of age and the return of a small-town madman make for strange but not altogether unwelcome bedfellows in this affecting debut.
Camptown is a nowhere English city described by poet Greenlaw as “awkward and diminished.” It’s the kind of place that has plenty of history—dating back to the Roman occupation—but none of it is especially interesting. As unassuming as it is, however, it’s where 17-year-old Mary George, from the small nearby village of Allnorthover, spends most of her time. Mary seems more awkward than she is—with a ragged, boyish haircut, glasses, and clunky outfits—and her interesting mixture of adolescent confusion and remarkably resilient spirit make her an engaging protagonist for a story without much of a narrative center. The outside element used to prod things along is the return to town of Tom Hepple, a lifelong lunatic. Walking by the reservoir that now covers his old family home, Tom is convinced that he sees Mary George walking on the water. Even though the townspeople dismiss any worries about his potential for violence, Mary’s mother recognizes the critical part of his personality right away: “He was a force, a hurricane, sweeping things up, breaking down doors, sucking people in and under.” Tom’s attempts to readjust to Allnorthover life, though, are put on the back burner by the author, who devotes many of her words to rich descriptions of Mary’s episodic, mostly rudderless life: smoking dope with her best friend Billy, hanging out at the record store, attempting to dye her clothes black (a stunt that comically backfires), and fumbling toward a relationship with a boy named Daniel. The ’70s setting is richly evoked, with the threat of energy and water shortages looming over daily events and the raw, slashing sounds of punk rock cutting through the local youth with a fiery intensity.
While many will appreciate Greenlaw’s intimate portrayal of Mary’s life, the focus here is diffused by less-clearly-realized investigations into her family’s past and the recurring figure of Tom—who will drag us toward an ending we didn’t need or want.Pub Date: July 9, 2001
ISBN: 0-618-09523-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
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