This rich work—in all its (very real) glories, despite its (inevitable) longueurs—is the logical culmination of an obsession...
Bell’s heroically ambitious trilogy comes to a close as he delves into the concluding months of the Haitian Revolution, begun in 1791, and the final days of that island country’s black liberator, Toussaint Louverture.
As he did in its critically praised predecessors (All Souls’ Rising, 1995; Master of the Crossroads, 2000), Bell constructs his bulky narrative as a series of juxtapositions: military maneuverings and battlefield confrontations as experienced by Toussaint’s freed black soldiers on the one hand, and, on the other, troops led by France’s Generals Le Clerc and Rochambeau, entrusted with reestablishing slavery (despite Bonaparte’s contrary promises) and ordered to capture Louverture. Soldiers’ ordeals are both contrasted with, and related to, the lives of white plantation owners and their families, and omniscient narration is frequently interrupted by the voice of former slave (now Toussaint’s trusted lieutenant) Riau, one of the trilogy’s most complex and interesting characters. Others include stoical French doctor Antoine Hebert, long sympathetic to the former slaves’ plight; his beautiful, oversexed sister Esther Tocquet and her bosom friend Isabelle Cigny (whose privileged lives become increasingly endangered); planter Michel Arnaud and his imperious wife Claudine, whose horrific crime against a slave woman will not go unpunished; and Toussaint’s sons Placide and Isaac, first seen aboard a ship en route to Sainte Domingue to join their father, where only one will declare himself Toussaint’s ally. The story’s dimensions are further multiplied by flash-forwards to Toussaint’s imprisonment at Fort de Joux in the French Alps, where he ponders his great mission’s successes and failures, as he awaits the arrival of “Baron Samedi,” the Haitian avatar of death. At the very least, Bell’s willed masterpiece is a brilliant synthesis of historical fact and a consistently absorbing story. Readers who persevere through the trilogy’s almost 2,000 pages will be amply rewarded.
This rich work—in all its (very real) glories, despite its (inevitable) longueurs—is the logical culmination of an obsession with racial issues that has consistently dominated Bell’s fiction. As such, it merits the utmost attention and respect.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-42282-X
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2004
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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