Sanders's latest Texas novel (Texas Noon, Fort Worth, etc.) is, for want of anything more fitting, a good old-fashioned read. The heroes may be a bit too sturdy and the damsels plucky in the extreme, but this tale of the early days of the Texas Republic and the Logan family's dreams and ambitions is perfect for whiling away an evening or two. Tad Logan, a hero of the Texas Revolution, comes to Charleston, South Carolina, in 1839 in order to demand his inheritance from his father. He finds more than he sought, however, eventually returning to Texas with a new bride, Corrie McNair (whom he woos away from her fiancÇ), his younger brother, and her younger sister. Against all advice, the four settle in San Antonio, a beautiful site threatened by both Mexicans and Indians. As Tad becomes deeply involved in politics as part of his effort to create the independent nation of his dreams and to deal with the increasingly thorny debate over whether the Republic should willingly annex itself to the US, he begins to pay less and less attention to his family. Corrie's jilted suitor, Ramsey Cothburn, comes to Texas himself, creating several emotional crises over the years. Younger brother Whit eventually chooses a career with the Texas Rangers, fighting on the Mexican border (both brothers will spend time in Mexican prisons). Younger sister Prue grows into a beautiful woman with conflicting romantic desires, resulting in some rather melodramatic goings-on in the latter stages of the novel. The story continues through the annexation of Texas in 1845 and to the Civil War, in which Whit's and Tad's sons, Jim and Albert, fight for the Confederacy. A fairy tale of the American West, but most certainly not one in which everyone lives happily ever after.
Pub Date: Sept. 9, 1992
ISBN: 0-385-29916-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1992
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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