A well-intentioned novel about how the psychic scars of slavery manifest themselves through generations of African-American women. The present is 2012, as 67-year-old Hermine awaits the death of her mean-spirited old Aunt Story. As the two bicker over the availability of fresh produce instead of the pain-filled past, Brown (Rainbow Roun' Mah Shoulder, not reviewed) offers a multi- perspectived narrative of the family history, beginning in 1873 with Story's grandmother, Georgia. Brown attempts to show the everlasting shackles of slavery: Georgia continued working for Massa McCloud even after emancipation and still had to come when he called her to his bed. Then there's the story of Georgia's daughter, Sadie. After her mother's experience with McCloud, Sadie considered herself lucky to choose her man, but she still suffered when husband Jacob turned sour under the weight of discrimination, disciplining his children and his wife to the point of abuse. Brown's tale focuses in on one of Sadie's children, Story, who grew up suffocated, not allowed to dance or play or get dirty or even make noise in her own house. Despite her childhood vows to escape this prison when she grew up, Story became a stereotypical product of her environment, so determined to pull herself up that she became as emotionally limited as her parents and, despite Brown's attempts to make her pitiable or understandable, even more reprehensible. Story seduced her younger sister's boyfriend and forced that sister to go to a quack abortionist, who killed her. She got pregnant by the same man and married him herself, then left him with their child while he was in a coma after a car accident. She raised her daughter Hermine, who she claimed was her niece, with even more restrictions and less love than she had. Unfortunately, Brown's narrative, in both past and present, proves muddled, and her thoroughly damaged characters are unsympathetic. Confusing and oppressive.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-37857-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1994
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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