With elegant prose enlivened by shards of mean humor, MacDonald captures how hard it is to love and/or trust abroad or at...
In these 12 stories, MacDonald (Montpelier Tomorrow, 2014, etc.) uses far-flung, often exotic locales to emphasize her characters’ difficulties in making emotional connections.
The title story sets the tone—anger at odds with longing: when a vacationing American realizes that the rug merchant with whom she’s had a fling in Istanbul has set her up for what is probably a scam, memories of her estranged deadbeat brother complicate her reaction. “Pancho Villa’s Coin” offers a child’s jaundiced view of a trip to Mexico with her beaten-down mother and alcoholic, abusive father. “Key West” presents a single mother vacationing with her adored but selfishly obnoxious college-age son. Another desperate mother in “Finding Peter” searches for her missing adopted 18-year-old son in Prague, where he has disappeared because he feels “at home here.” The community college student in “Proud to Be an American”—set in Ohio—feels betrayed when his boss, a father figure, gives him notice. In “Two Trains in Manmad,” the arrival of her widowed mother-in-law from India forces a Canadian woman to face the reality of her long marriage. In contrast, the Japanese “Ambassador of Foreign Affairs” arrives in California for his daughter’s reluctant marriage to an American and sees that love may be possible across cultures. Other stories show glints of similar optimism. A young American man with a facial deformity finds emotional acceptance from an unlikely source in Thailand. A 73-year-old woman exploring Turkey’s Anatolian coast with her adult granddaughter stops trying to be the “cool, adventuresome grandma” and relaxes in “Tesekkür.” In “Oregano,” a newly married 42-year-old finds her much younger husband continually annoying until he catches her off guard. Elderly affection becomes a possibility in “The Bean Grower.” The harshest story, “Weekend in Baltimore”—about racial injustice and, to a lesser degree, friendship—is timely but obvious and stands apart from the rest of the volume.
With elegant prose enlivened by shards of mean humor, MacDonald captures how hard it is to love and/or trust abroad or at home.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-940333-08-3
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Summertime Publications Inc.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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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