A complex, ambitious, and thought-provoking novel about unifying love.
Unwitting players in a universe-spanning game make choices that will determine Earth’s survival in this novel of ideas.
New York City–based investment banker David Cornwell is selfish, arrogant, and obsessed with winning. He loves his job: “The pure, shameless focus on making outrageous amounts of money. On being the first. The top. The richest. The best.” Meanwhile, on a world called Home Planet, a gray being called Noœ-bouk uses his energy-channeling abilities to help along the planet’s long-term development. Next, Noœ-bouk will travel to Earth in an attempt to help it to ascend to a new plane of consciousness. Elsewhere, in what seems to be a huge library, the newly dead Sir Alisdair McCauley meets Duncan, a guide who will prepare him to review his happy, successful life. Back in London, Alisdair’s beloved, free-spirited granddaughter, Elspeth, decides whether she should take the guaranteed job that he’d arranged for her. But as Noœ-bouk, Alisdair, and Elspeth take steps toward greater knowledge and freedom, David spirals downward, committing a terrible crime. All their destinies turn out to be part of a massive “unity game,” which eventually leads to love, experienced in every possible manifestation. Meriel (The Woman Behind the Waterfall, 2016) transcends genre in this novel, employing elements of magical realism, science fiction, love stories, and philosophy as well as keen-eyed social critique, employing a range of voices. The novel requires some patience, particularly during the sections dealing with Noœ-bouk’s narrative, written in a remote, dry, and abstract tone and requiring readers to assimilate a good deal of information. Yet the story of Noœ-bouk (which later includes another character, Adm. Ba-hutá) becomes, in its way, a deeply romantic tale of love and sacrifice. Problematic, though, is the idea that earthly injustice or evil is merely a “brave life path” freely chosen by advanced souls. This view makes sense of why someone like David might deserve redemption, but many readers may find it hard to swallow nonetheless.
A complex, ambitious, and thought-provoking novel about unifying love.Pub Date: May 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-911079-43-9
Page Count: 342
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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