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
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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