An expertly realized novel about the redemptive power of art.
Hospital patients fight for richer lives in Cantwell’s (Rosa's Gift and Other Stories, 2013) latest novel.
Thirty-four-year-old Philip Nason is the recreational director of Riverview Hospital, situated on an island in the middle of New York’s East River. The facility is used as a long-term-care facility for chronically ill patients, many of whom are partially or completely paralyzed. Nason originally took a job there to get a worry-free, steady paycheck that would allow him to pursue his off-hours dream of writing poetry. He’s been on thin ice with the Riverview administration for some time, mainly due to his free-thinking approach to providing his patients with meaningful activities. As the novel opens, several of these patients have just staged a “supper rebellion”—upending their food trays in protest against the hospital’s tasteless fare and indifferent staff. The institution’s administrators know that Nason has read to these patients about Henry David Thoreau and civil disobedience, so they’re certain that he’s the root cause of the unrest. Riverview is a bleak place, a human junkyard offering little to the patients who end up there; the patients even refer to it as “Farewell Island.” When Nason confronts the case of alcoholic quadriplegic Clayton Thomas, he dreams of turning Riverview’s hopelessness into something more fulfilling, for both himself and the patients; specifically, he wants to help Thomas to learn how to paint by holding a brush in his mouth. The spiritually charged artwork that eventually results is revolutionary, but the more conservative elements of Riverview’s administration fight Nason and his program. Cantwell fills his well-structured, compassionate novel with convincing insider knowledge of life inside a long-term-care facility, and its many details feel memorably authentic. He avoids turning his characters into the clichéd, otherworldly innocents that often fill fiction set in hospitals. However, there’s a fair amount of rough language scattered throughout the book (“ ‘Cut the shit, and just tell me what you want,’ Clayton snapped”), and some surprisingly explicit sex scenes. Overall, however, the resulting story is ultimately uplifting, precisely because it’s not idealized.
An expertly realized novel about the redemptive power of art.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2014
ISBN: 978-1491746530
Page Count: 356
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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