Raw yet gripping exploration of mental illness.
In this debut novel, Harry Taylor recounts his mistaken marriage to a schizophrenic, detailing her “Voice” and mercenary, mentally unstable family.
Harry, who was in between college and law school in 1969, met younger Terri through a cousin and married her in his middle age. She admitted to having mental issues, but Harry was assured by her doctor that these were controlled by medication; thus, as expressed in the novel’s first chapter heading, “The Prognosis Is Good.” Harry soon found out this was a misdiagnosis, since Terri became hostile about having sex, intensely concerned about his money, and, worst of all, obsessive in her desire to kill her parents, particularly her mother, from whom she likely inherited her mental illness. Harry began to realize that Terri was in full sway to what she described as her “Voice.” His first-person account provides a picture of what these racing thoughts were like and how he initially wanted to help Terri but soon felt helpless and then resolved upon divorce. He ended up battling Terri’s parents in court proceedings since they had welcomed him taking over Terri’s medical costs and pushed for a big settlement. He finally extricated himself but is now lonely and shell-shocked by the experience. Terri and her family met even more tragic ends. Author Malady seems very likely to be a pseudonym for someone who has confronted similar circumstances. Regardless, the author captures the horror and pain of such a predicament. The “Voice” chapters are particularly striking, engendering surprising sympathy for the troublesome Terri. The narrative is undercut a bit by its rambling style, which has some digressive and seemingly nonchronological sequences, as well as its dwelling on money grievances; both issues dilute the work’s larger, more important discussion about handling mental illness. Still, this account offers plenty of fascinating documentarylike moments, not least of which is the author’s intriguing assertion that “the source of religious inspiration might be mental illness.”
Raw yet gripping exploration of mental illness.Pub Date: March 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-1507650523
Page Count: 110
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 8, 2015
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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