An uneven birds-eye view of one family’s journey.
In this debut novel, Kiefer portrays the struggles of a multicultural Texas family.
Corrado emigrates from Sicily to the United States in 1905, eventually establishing himself as a migrant worker and marrying a Mexican woman, Violeta. The young couple’s life in Texas is difficult, and Violeta bears an astonishing 18 children in 22 years, who eventually provide help with field work. One of the daughters, Fabia, later gets pregnant by a miserable, abusive man, with whom she goes on to have 11 more kids. The eldest girl in that family, Lucia, goes on to marry a white man, Rand, under the mistaken assumption that white men don’t beat their wives. Together, they have three children, and Rand regularly sexually abuses the middle child, Mateo. When Lucia discovers this, she takes her kids, leaves her husband, and embarks on the difficult life of a poor, single working mother. She meets a man named Gerald at the bar where she works, falls in love, and marries him. But financial hardship continues, followed by tragedy; in need of money and stability, Lucia later marries Donald, who’s in the U.S. Air Force, and this union lasts. Here, the novel takes a curious spin: the narrative leaps back in time, recounting the same events from Lucia’s eldest son Julian’s point of view, followed by Mateo’s. While creative, this tactic drags things down, as one must read slight variations of the same story three times. That said, Mateo’s journey does extend the time frame of the previous sections, showing his evolution from troubled teenager to successful lawyer. Even with Mateo’s clear arc, though, the novel may struggle to engage readers, due to its underdeveloped, clunky prose: “While he, Mike, that is, was definitely heterosexual, even if he wasn’t, there was no way he would allow himself to be seduced by a teenage boy.” When the author lets dramatic moments breathe, however, the book finds sturdy ground; for example, a scene in which Rand ruthlessly hunts young Mateo is absolutely chilling. Unfortunately, the book is littered with anecdotes that have little bearing on the overall narrative, including minor robberies and consequence-free one-night stands.
An uneven birds-eye view of one family’s journey.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-979585-03-3
Page Count: 322
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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