A frustrating debut that doesn’t reach nearly far enough. But don’t bet that it won’t become very, very popular.
Echoes of Bang the Drum Slowly, The Natural, and Brian’s Song are heard throughout this literate weeper about an athlete dying young: an intermittently incisive though ultimately flat first novel.
The story’s narrated—in a pleasingly lucid, confident voice—by Joe Columbus, the older brother who watches with mingled amazement, subdued pride, and rancorous envy as his sibling CJ becomes a baseball phenom and a beloved public figure. Joe drifts into marriage with his college girlfriend Beth, then settles into a career as a high-school science teacher as she moves into a high-pressure law firm. Meanwhile, golden boy CJ—as intelligent, friendly, and generous as he is athletically gifted—rises from sandlot prominence in their southern California neighborhood to dazzling success as the Chicago Cubs’ All Star third baseman, even challenging Joe DiMaggio’s consecutive game-hitting streak. Friedman forcefully communicates the jealousy even Joe knows is irrational and unfair (“What I really wanted was that some thing, the smallest thing, would be denied him”). But there isn’t really a whole lot of novel here. Subplots involving Joe’s dealings with a problem student, Beth’s relationship with a colleague who uses her as model for a character in his fiction, and the couple’s incompatibility, seemingly cured by her surprise pregnancy, bear a token relation to the main plot here, but really only manage to distract our attention from it. Even potentially strong scenes, like Joe’s nighttime visit with his father to “Nikeland” while CJ lies gravely ill in a hospital, are inexplicably truncated, as if Friedman saw no need to develop them. Still, there’s no doubt that the Cain-and-Abel tension between the brothers engages our attention, or that the emotional closing pages do not have genuine impact.
A frustrating debut that doesn’t reach nearly far enough. But don’t bet that it won’t become very, very popular.Pub Date: March 29, 2001
ISBN: 0-618-02520-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
In this vivid and moving book, Orange articulates the challenges and complexities not only of Native Americans, but also of...
Orange’s debut novel offers a kaleidoscopic look at Native American life in Oakland, California, through the experiences and perspectives of 12 characters.
An aspiring documentary filmmaker, a young man who has taught himself traditional dance by watching YouTube, another lost in the bulk of his enormous body—these are just a few of the point-of-view characters in this astonishingly wide-ranging book, which culminates with an event called the Big Oakland Powwow. Orange, who grew up in the East Bay and is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, knows the territory, but this is no work of social anthropology; rather, it is a deep dive into the fractured diaspora of a community that remains, in many ways, invisible to many outside of it. “We made powwows because we needed a place to be together,” he writes. “Something intertribal, something old, something to make us money, something we could work toward, for our jewelry, our songs, our dances, our drum.” The plot of the book is almost impossible to encapsulate, but that’s part of its power. At the same time, the narrative moves forward with propulsive force. The stakes are high: For Jacquie Red Feather, on her way to meet her three grandsons for the first time, there is nothing as conditional as sobriety: “She was sober again,” Orange tells us, “and ten days is the same as a year when you want to drink all the time.” For Daniel Gonzales, creating plastic guns on a 3-D printer, the only lifeline is his dead brother, Manny, to whom he writes at a ghostly Gmail account. In its portrayal of so-called “Urban Indians,” the novel recalls David Treuer’s The Hiawatha, but the range, the vision, is all its own. What Orange is saying is that, like all people, Native Americans don’t share a single identity; theirs is a multifaceted landscape, made more so by the sins, the weight, of history. That some of these sins belong to the characters alone should go without saying, a point Orange makes explicit in the novel’s stunning, brutal denouement. “People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them,” James Baldwin wrote in a line Orange borrows as an epigraph to one of the book’s sections; this is the inescapable fate of every individual here.
In this vivid and moving book, Orange articulates the challenges and complexities not only of Native Americans, but also of America itself.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-52037-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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