Thoughtfully written but emotionally distant and overly cerebral.
Hamilton (Staircase of a Thousand Steps, 2003) tracks an American journalist in the Middle East.
Outside Beirut, on the way to interview a Lebanese crime kingpin with terrorist ties, reporter Caddie Blair survives an ambush that kills British photographer Marcus. Recovering in a dingy hospital, Caddie realizes that she has no one to notify. Marcus was her lover; her grandmother and mother are long dead, and she has few friends in Jerusalem, where she lives. If she ever had a home, it was with Marcus—he’d understood her passion for her work, and she’d admired his: he’d had an uncommon talent for capturing moments that defined the grinding conflict between Israel and the countries that surround it. But his fame was no protection against his fate—and his unknown murderers will go unpunished. Desiring a revenge she can’t take, Caddie plunges back into reporting, maintaining a careful distance, yet drawn to scenes of violence as she reflects on Marcus’s meaningless death, her parents’ long-ago abandonment of her, and her own taste for life on the razor’s edge. Fluent in Arabic, she talks to a Palestinian woman seeking treatment for her mortally injured daughter, knowing that the woman’s young son built the bomb that burned his little sister to the bone. Before the doctors realize that Caddie is American, she learns the hideous truth: there isn’t enough morphine to go around and not enough penicillin. In a restless quest to get a story—any story—she interviews Moshe Bar Lev, a militant settler. A firebomb destroys the bus they’re riding, and the settlers retaliate with gunfire, hoping to kill as many Arabs as possible. All in a day’s work . . . . Moshe returns home to dinner with his family and Caddie tags along. There’s no peace to be found—though she does find love again with a fellow journalist, himself a survivor of tragic violence.
Thoughtfully written but emotionally distant and overly cerebral.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2004
ISBN: 1-932961-02-X
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Unbridled Books
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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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