With his usual partisan magnanimity, Uris devotes himself to another popular/unpopular lost cause, the Irish, and in particular the Fenian struggle which extended from the mid 19th century to the Easter Monday Uprising of 1916 in all its "Terrible Beauty." The Trinity of the title, according to the publishers, refers to three families (only two are around for most of the book) but surely must be the past, present and future which keeps repeating itself inexorably through the years. Uris' persistently researched and reconstituted history goes even further back with 18th century insets and the potato famine and Parnell and, and, and. Prominent here, not really by virtue of characterization, is Conor Larkin, a crofty whose "hungering to read" leads to considerable knowledge if never enough to escape his Bogside beginnings; then there are the Hubbles and Weeds, affiliated by wealth, their British backgrounds, and marriage, eventually unto Roger Hubble, political major-domo of western Ulster and his "smashing" wife Caroline who can't help but notice the attractive Conor. But he will fall in love with a Scots-Presbyterian girl, an unthinkable liaison in terms of politics and the Church, just as Jeremy Hubble's love for a girl called Molly Rafferty can never be sanctioned. Out of both fact and fiction, spackled with innumerable "Jaysuses" and "Hail Maws," Uris surely will once again achieve that state of grace where doing good is tantamount to doing well. Be it admitted, he keeps his story sturdily self-perpetuating without interrupting its continuity by so much as having to change the ribbon on his typewriter.
Pub Date: March 5, 1976
ISBN: 0060827882
Page Count: 914
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1976
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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