A story of reawakening and self-acceptance, well worth the trip.
Overcome by the monotony of his lackluster life in Kansas City, Mo., Dr. Gregory Barth heads west in Zehr’s debut novel.
When it rains, it pours, and for Gregory Barth, a therapist living life on the straight and narrow, it was pouring. In one day, he was bombarded with stories and images of people throwing life’s rulebook out the window: first his best friend, followed by two patients, and then by the anonymous man commuting from home to office on a motorcycle. Barth’s own story is predictable—a predictability that quickly frustrates the reader as much as it does Barth. He had never deviated from his routine. Even on his vacations, which he spends in town, he visits the office. But, to the narrative’s benefit and his own, Barth finally does something spontaneous: He buys a motorcycle, takes a month off and goes west, where the “air was drier ... the vegetation sparse, and the horizons more distant.” The tone turns desolate and reflective as he passes descansos (roadside memorials) on his journey of self-discovery and rebirth, maneuvering his new vehicle through the scenic West. Estrella, who piques Barth’s interest, is one of many desplazados—meaning those who have been displaced. She survived a traumatic life in Mexico, where the drug world ruled her neighborhood. After crossing the border into El Norte, she now runs a truck stop with her mother and son, Matias, in a small New Mexico town, where she meets Barth. Their connection is magnetic, prompting Barth to prolong his stay. But the West calls to Barth, just as the North called to Estrella. Zehr thoughtfully illustrates each person—Estrella, the other characters Barth meets on his travels and Barth himself—as a desplazado, whether physically or mentally. Barth gleans his own desplazado nature as he realizes he took this trip because of “a yearning to expose himself, in some small measure, to the unknown.”
A story of reawakening and self-acceptance, well worth the trip.Pub Date: May 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9987583-0-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: ZenRider Press
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2012
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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