A complex book asks big questions and rewards those who are willing to go along for the ride.
A young man reflects on life and love in this novel from a veteran author.
Like many 27-year-olds, Games Shepard is not quite sure what he wants out of life or what his purpose on Earth is. When Garbisch’s (The Shore, 2012, etc.) sprawling story opens, Games is attending a mountaintop memorial service for a friend. There, he meets Rianna, and the two embark on a tentative romance. As he and Rianna negotiate the contours of their budding relationship, Games tries out different jobs and ponders his choices. “I’m tired of all this aloneness I feel,” he muses early on. Over 12 chapters, the author gives free rein to Games’ ruminations on life, which are paired with stories from 12 people who the philosophically minded protagonist encounters in his ramblings—and which are often more compelling than his own prosaic adventures. Readers of a similar questioning bent will delight in following his journey of self-discovery, though the less patient may be frustrated by the tale’s sweeping, discursive style. References to literature, mythology, film, and psychology abound. Two characters talk “Jungianly, reaching into symbols and the primitive unconscious,” while another drops a mysterious box of books on Games’ doorstep, accompanied by a note referencing a Yeats poem. Garbisch also delights in wordplay, as characters repeatedly misunderstand one another’s meaning and reflect on the similarity of certain terms and phrases: “I had a selfish purpose…I wanted to bring the newcomer out of his shell. Selfish, shell—I seem to be playing with words, but I’m not,” notes one. At times, these language games are amusing or revealing, though they’re just as often distracting. Dialogue is written without quotation marks; some readers may miss the punctuation marks, though their absence works with the ambitious book’s stream-of-consciousness style. Garbisch also has a keen eye for detail and the ability to find magic in the mundane, as when Games and Rianna are described as “scattering playfulness like sunflower seeds throughout their conversations.”
A complex book asks big questions and rewards those who are willing to go along for the ride.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-692-87721-0
Page Count: 516
Publisher: Alkion Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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