A sometimes-engaging but crowded drama in which some characters get short shrift.
Past decisions continue to haunt a family in Posey’s (Under the Lone Star Sky, 2016, etc.) latest series installment.
In 1975, Amanda Patterson, a privileged college student, participates in a drunken orgy and wakes up with a corpse of a young man named Wilson Izack in her back seat. She makes a fateful decision (“I can’t be in trouble again”) and hides the body, hoping to leave the horrible situation behind her. Predictably, Amanda’s life is shaped by this death, and despite later personal and professional success, she can’t quite shake the memory. Meanwhile, Amanda’s cousin Laura Wynn is also haunted by the memory of Wilson—but in a much more tangible way, as her one-night stand with him resulted in a pregnancy. She decides to put her baby up for adoption, and then heads to New York City to launch a music career. It turns out, however, that neither woman can truly break her connection to the past. Amanda and Laura’s lives take center stage in Posey’s novel, but many other members of the sprawling Campbell family also make appearances, including matriarch Skye, Amanda’s grandmother, who appeared in previous series installments. Her children and grandchildren are scattered throughout the United States, but their connections endure. Although Posey includes a short summary of Skye’s descendants, a more visual family tree would have been helpful to keep track of the large cast of characters. References to President Jimmy Carter and MTV are helpful touchstones that gracefully ground the narrative in particular eras. However, Posey tackles so many family issues that she’s unable to resolve them all in an emotionally satisfying manner. Amanda’s brother Dave, for instance, has a drug problem, but it’s quickly and neatly fixed with a stint in rehab. A more nuanced approach to minor players’ travails might have packed a greater punch.
A sometimes-engaging but crowded drama in which some characters get short shrift.Pub Date: July 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-5006-2329-6
Page Count: 318
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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