Yet these are quibbles in a novel so rich. First-timer Durkee writes with a southern accent that doesn’t smother a unique...
A tremendously energetic first novel about the childhood, adolescence, and emerging manhood of a troubled Mississippi boy in the decade after Vietnam.
Whether the ghosts are real or in his head, small-town Noel Weatherspoon is haunted, first by his father, declared MIA in Vietnam when Noel was in first grade, then by the Little League catcher who slipped into a coma after ten-year-old Noel slammed into him at home plate. Remorseful yet self-important, Noel lives according to his permanent sense of guilt. A natural outsider, he’s drawn into guilt-affirming behavior with other outsiders—beginning with his only Jewish classmate, then the minister’s rebellious daughter, and finally a fired college professor. The first third of the story is chock-full of events and characters, too many to cite here, as Durkee combines the haunting lyricism of his prologue, told from the comatose catcher’s point of view, with blatantly crude comedy that will have readers laughing out loud despite themselves (think watermelon and horny boys). With more plot turns than you’ll find in a year of daytime soaps, Durkee introduces a slew of people who are colorful yet never caricatures, from the single mother of Noel’s best friend who gets stoned with the boys, unaware that Noel has a naked snapshot of her, to Noel’s stepfather, whose resemblance to Billy Graham underscores his tragicomic relationship with Noel. Perhaps inevitably, the author does lose some steam as he goes along. Although Noel’s college experience has its charms, particularly his twisted, unconsummated affair with a married and fired professor, the moral crisis that he finally confronts seems forced, the author’s fingerprints seen too visibly all over the denouement.
Yet these are quibbles in a novel so rich. First-timer Durkee writes with a southern accent that doesn’t smother a unique voice, and his roller-coaster ride of a story leaves a reader breathless and waiting for more.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-393-04971-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000
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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