Enger writes in an expansive style suitable to his sprawling subject.
Set in 1886, Enger’s novel embraces not one but three journeys that involve guilt, expiation and redemption.
The first quest is that of Ulysses Pope, who lives with his wife, Gretta, and two sons, Eli and Danny. One day, Ulysses ups and disappears from their home in Sloan’s Crossing, Minnesota, leaving no note and no reason to part. For the previous year—in fact, ever since he was baptized—Gretta had noticed some strange behavior in her husband but nothing to make her think he'd leave home. Although Eli is only a teenager, he quickly decides to pursue his father to find out what happened. He tries to sneak away in the dead of night but finds that Danny has followed him; even though his brother is rather sickly, Eli lets him stay on the quest in pursuit of their father. Meanwhile, in a plot development that would reek of soap opera if it weren’t so well-handled, moneylender Mead Fogarty is putting pressure on Gretta to acknowledge that her husband has left permanently and that her best opportunity for economic survival resides with him. Eli and Danny finally catch up with their father, who, it turns out, has led something of a secret life: He was in Custer’s Indian campaign out West and committed an atrocity against an Indian family. The motive for his journey has been to try to make amends for his crime. The psychology of character deepens as, along the way, he starts to get involved in the third quest of the novel—hunting in Montana with a scientist/taxidermist from the Smithsonian who wants to kill buffalo and have them stuffed so their legacy will not be lost on future generations.
Enger writes in an expansive style suitable to his sprawling subject.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61620-375-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
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