In summary: ridiculous but, in reading, undeniably entertaining.
Deadly knitting needles, incestuous sibling, burning houses, and voodoo spells are just a few of the over-the-top plot devices in this rollicking, racy, sometimes hammy multigenerational tale from Files (Getting to the Good Part, 1998, etc.).
The narrative begins in 1966 with the death of Ophelia's baby Hamlet (a few characters’ names and a lot of violent deaths constitute the main similarities between Files’s novel and Shakespeare’s play), then weaves back and forth through her family's troubled past. Siblings Grace and Walter, born and raised in rural Tennessee, find comfort from the their father’s rages in their love for each other. But when he discovers Grace and Walter playing naked by the river, he beats them so fiercely that their mother kills her husband to save her children. Years later, when she finds the two playing a more advanced version of the game, she also kills herself. Grace becomes pregnant by her brother, marries kind Big Daddy, and bears Ophelia. Walter runs off to New Orleans, where he meets the beautiful but deadly Sukie. She may have already killed her sister and father, and her mother goes missing very shortly after Walter arrives in town; by the time he returns to Tennessee, Sukie is his wife. The newlyweds move in near Grace and Big Daddy, so Sukie can conveniently work her black magic. Grace and Big Daddy have two sons, the impressionable Polo and the sadistic Lay, who gets lessons from Aunt Sukie in the art of destroying others. After he makes Ophelia pregnant with Hamlet, Lay is sent to Detroit and quickly becomes a fearsome drug-dealer, soon involving sweet Polo in his schemes. Much, much more occurs in a tale busy enough to satisfy the requirements of several novels—or Elizabethan tragedies. Few of the developments are happy, though at end Ophelia manages to overcome the curse of her name.
In summary: ridiculous but, in reading, undeniably entertaining.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2001
ISBN: 0-684-84143-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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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