Not a wasted moment in this terrifying and terribly funny book.
“The Troubles” of Northern Ireland haunt the weeks around Christmas 1979 for a prison guard and the mother of a prisoner.
Dean, whose Becoming Strangers (Jan. 2006) was on various prize lists, short and long, gives us John Dunn, an Englishman starting a new job in the Northern Ireland prisons after 20 years in the British Army, and Kathleen Moran, mother of four, one of whom is in Dunn’s prison. The two live on opposite sides of a city that was, it must be remembered, as viciously torn as Beirut not that long ago. Dunn is a loner, a near-orphan who took the army as his family and his path as well as his livelihood, serving in various hot spots during his career. His time in Northern Ireland in the early days of the Troubles taught him to love the place, and his attachment to Angela, the woman with whom he now lives, brought him back to stay. Kathleen Moran has never been off the island. Married young to a windy braggart who is now, predictably, a drunk working in the local pub, Kathleen smokes through her chaotic days, frantic with fear for her oldest child, Sean, an IRA prisoner, and edgy with lust for Brendan Coogan, the handsome spokesman for the Republican cause. Sean Moran and his fellow prisoners have for three years protested their criminal status by eschewing prison uniforms. Naked in their freezing cells, they defecate on the floor and write their politics on the walls using bits of their mattresses as paintbrushes. And as they wait for the Brits to recognize their political status, they order the murder of their guards. This grim story is told with sharp wit and sharper love. Readers who manage to leave Dean’s worlds of East and West Belfast without a bitter sympathy for both sides of the grinding Ulster conflict are in dire need of heart transplants.
Not a wasted moment in this terrifying and terribly funny book.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2007
ISBN: 0-15-101253-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2006
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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