A bracingly realistic tale that pivots on a moment of sheer terror.
A husband and father loses his lower leg as a result of a tragic automobile accident in this novel.
Forty-one-year-old Jack Miller works as “a mechanical engineer in a small R & D company” in Woodfield, Connecticut. His spouse, Sasha, is described as “a take-charge mother and a wife in career mode” who works in the hospitality industry. Along with their two young children, George and Rose, the couple seem to lead a perfect life. But cracks begin to appear in their marriage, and Jack begins a short but steamy romance with Sandy, a realtor he is introduced to at his country club. Feeling a sudden pang of conscience, Jack visits Sandy to break off the affair and then leaves to pick up George and Rose in his SUV. Jack becomes distracted, and the vehicle careers off the road and into a lake. As the car fills with water, Jack attempts to save his children but finds that his mangled ankle is trapped in the wreckage. He regains consciousness in a hospital room, facing life as an amputee and the weight of his actions. During his darkest moments, Utah, an old friend, calls unexpectedly, and Jack’s life changes again. Barrett’s (I’ll Be Looking at the Moon, 2016) first novel was a story of resilience and second chances, and this new offering is thematically similar. As in her previous work, the author displays a talent for capturing the complexity of human connections. Describing the all-consuming nature of Jack’s affair, Barrett notes: “He had felt that when he was with her, he was inside an opaque microcosm from which he could not see beyond the space the two of them occupied.” Her writing is shrewd and analytical, meticulously mapping out Jack’s arduous psychological journey as the narrative progresses: “Only in his dreams was his sadness able to burst into his subconscious and plunder his brain to inflict its mortal wounds directly to his heart.” The author also accurately addresses the daily physical challenges faced by Jack as an amputee, such as the frustrations of putting on a pair of trousers when wearing a prosthesis. The story may appear unappealingly bleak to some readers, but Barrett provides slivers of hope throughout, resulting in a gut-wrenching but unexpectedly inspirational read.
A bracingly realistic tale that pivots on a moment of sheer terror.Pub Date: March 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-79875-295-1
Page Count: 239
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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