Powerful forces clash but don’t engage in a way to involve the reader.
Mexican-Americans and other minorities struggle for power in an L.A. steel mill, in a heartfelt but disjointed first novel from this poet, autobiographer and storywriter (The Republic of East L.A., 2002, etc.).
The prologue, set in 1944, sees Procopio Salcido, 19, gravitate from northern Mexico to L.A., where he marries the even younger Eladia and is hired by Nazareth Steel (modeled on the now-defunct Bethlehem Steel, where Rodriguez once worked). The Salcidos have six children, but when their only daughter dies in infancy, Procopio shuts down, neglecting his five boys and devastating the youngest, Johnny, who winds up in prison. Fast-forward to 1970 when Johnny, now 20, joins Nazareth as one of the craft crews. His life at the mill until 1982, when it closes, is the heart of the story here. There is an old guard of racist white millwrights headed by Earl Denton, a Klan leader, along with a progressive group of young communists organized by college graduate Harley Cantrell. Johnny emerges as a natural leader, organizing a black/Mexican slate that almost defeats the old guard in union elections. Violence is rife. When women join the crews, one loses four fingers in an “accident” and her supervisors are badly beaten in a reprisal. Cantrell is murdered by a hit man. Always dominant is the mill itself, “an earth monster who can devour you.” Rodriguez veers haphazardly between the mill’s routines, its race-based politics and its disruption of domestic life, as the overwhelming stress drives the workers to drink. It all makes for a good story, but Rodriguez doesn’t know how to tell it: what should be dramatic high points (the election result, the murder) are just hiccups, while character development, like that of Johnny’s turnaround from inmate to organizer, simply happens. And, with the mill’s closing, Rodriguez runs out of material. The final third shifts into the first-person as Johnny’s grown daughter Azucena, a barrio hell-raiser, describes la vida loca.
Powerful forces clash but don’t engage in a way to involve the reader.Pub Date: May 3, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-056076-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Rayo/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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