A solid, character-driven tale of the wild ’60s.
Three women’s lives intersect during the tumultuous 1960s.
Set in Chicago in the buildup to the 1968 Democratic National Convention and during the convention itself, Travers’ novel occasionally seems plotted at random, with characters’ lives crisscrossing by chance and important moments being disposed of in a sentence or two. Fortunately, the characters Travers has created are all compelling enough that the happenstance plotting doesn’t derail the book. The strongest character is Sophie, a woman coping with the death of her lover and a world that either looked the other way from her homosexuality or openly derided it. Sophie attracts two women on separate journeys of coping with loss and finding renewal—Rose, a homeless woman trying hard to forget the daughter she lost and unable to keep from pitching in when she sees a garden that’s grown unruly, and Zak, a young teenager from the South who’s been forced to grow up much more quickly than she might have otherwise, thanks to a mother who’s far from the parent of the year. Sophie and Rose are vividly felt women that Travers imbues with all manner of rich personality traits and mournful memories. But Zak, who bears the burden of much of the plot, occasionally feels pulled from a shelf of stock characters. Still, Travers creates such a believable bond among the three women in a short amount of time that when that bond inevitably begins to fray, it all feels believably awful. Similarly, the ending becomes poignant thanks almost entirely to the characters and not to the machinations of the plot. Travers is an expansive writer and many of the book’s early passages are filled with long sections that could easily be condensed, but there’s a very good novel in here, just waiting for some strong editorial guidance to bring it out. And if nothing else, Travers’ evocation of ’60s Chicago is terrific, creating a real sense of a city on the brink of catastrophe, where the forgotten citizens reach out to each other because no one else will bother to do so.
A solid, character-driven tale of the wild ’60s.Pub Date: March 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-0983145806
Page Count: 276
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 23, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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