Landvik (Once in a Blue Moon Lodge, 2017, etc.) uses wisdom and her trademark humor to encourage readers to have a...
When Haze Evans, the Granite Greek Gazette’s columnist of 50-plus years, suffers a stroke, the paper’s editor, Susan McGrath, chooses to reprint one of her columns each day while hoping for her return to health.
Haze is a master at chronicling current events and interlacing them with memories from her life to form a poignant social commentary. She opens her heart to her readers and they grow to love her...although some are less tolerant of her open-book style, referred to as “puking on paper,” and others resent the political bent she reveals, earning her the name Radical Hag, which she cheerfully adopts while printing yummy recipes to offset her viewpoint. Her decades-old columns make a difference in the lives of a new generation of readers, especially Susan’s rebellious 15-year-old son, Sam. When Haze is in the hospital, Susan makes Sam, who’s at loose ends after his parents’ divorce, work at the Gazette, where he is charged with reading Haze’s old columns and choosing which ones to reprint. Finding nothing appealing in an old person’s writing, Sam fights the assignment but is inevitably drawn to Haze’s down-to-earth views. She piques his curiosity with the timelessness of her insights, and he shares her columns with his English class, which discusses them on Radical Hag Wednesday. Sam’s curiosity prompts him to snoop a bit in Haze’s office, leading him to a deep secret that she never shared with her readers and that brings new closeness to his relationship with his mother.
Landvik (Once in a Blue Moon Lodge, 2017, etc.) uses wisdom and her trademark humor to encourage readers to have a thoughtful response to the world and the people with whom they share it. A pleasure to read.Pub Date: March 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5179-0599-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Univ. of Minnesota
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
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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