Short, present-tense sections related in a young girl's voice create a simply stunning first novel. Vice (Creative Writing/Univ. of California Extension Program, Santa Cruz) takes as her narrator Lana Franklin—six at the beginning of this story and an adolescent by the time it ends—then populates an entire Indiana town through Lana's pronouncements, conjuring up characters like Neila Grimes, who shares a party-line with the Franklins and whose eavesdropping presence is often given away by her parakeet's loose lips. Lana's immediate family is particularly vivid: her sister, Abbie, five years Lana's senior and apparently mature; their volatile mother; and their increasingly crazy father. Incest has become a commonplace fictional subject, but it's rarely handled as delicately as it is here. Lana is never coy, just perfectly childlike: ``Daddy says okeydoke. He's done with me sitting on his lap, so he pushes that doohickey on the side of his chair and lets me go,'' she reports early on, then later, when she is hospitalized with an unnamed, itchy disease, she remarks that ``Mom comes to visit and she's all happy saying thanks to me she's got grounds to get rid of the old man for sure this time just wait and see.'' One of the major accomplishments here is Lana's gradual growth and the subtle changes in her voice and vocabulary. The short-burst chapters accumulate the weight of a family photo album. Abbie and Lana invent a game called ``The Old Man's Gone for Good,'' in which they come up with ever more creative ways of imagining their violent father's death. For her part, their mother is not faithful to her husband and careless about what she says in front of her daughters. Only a few unnecessary third-person chapters showing Lana's father's point of view mar the striking economy of language and plot. A streamlined vehicle for a writer with tremendous talent.
Pub Date: March 20, 1995
ISBN: 0-525-93863-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 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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