Two Jewish orphans flee Victorian London for a life as retailers to the Confederacy. Someday someone will get a handle on the wonderful story of the Jews who brought modern merchandising to the remotest corners of Dixie and whose stores are still the place to shop everywhere from Birmingham to Memphis. Until then, we are left with the likes of this plodding, ultra-sincere but humorlessly romantic history by the author of The Proprietor's Daughter (1988), etc. Here, Nathan Solomon and his cousin Leonora, orphaned early by a train wreck, have been left to the care of their dry-goods merchant uncle Samuel, who keeps them in his Bloomsbury home but works them to exhaustion in his store. Outraged by Uncle Sam's treatment of his starving subcontractor seamstress, and tipped by their kindly aunt to uncle's secret hoard of gold pieces, Nathan and Leonora flee to New Orleans, where they are taken under the wing of a kindly Jewish cotton trader. Nathan learns all about cotton, gambling, dueling, and love. There are romances with glamorous Creoles, swordfights, plagues, and lessons in moderate democracy. The cousins learn to love the South but loathe slavery. Leonora loves Nathan but gets engaged to somebody else. Nathan loves and loses. The Civil War brings the end of the good life in the Big Easy, and everybody goes off to Atlanta to start from scratch and become the founders of a nice department store. All this is told in quaint, mid-20th-century fifth-grade textbook prose. Safe, snoozy saga.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-8217-4015-6
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1992
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 presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
PERSPECTIVES
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