Doane (City of Light, 1992) uses a semisuccessful revolving narrative voice to relate the events following the discovery of a Native American's bones on the grounds of a South Dakota golf course in the early 1970s. When the state government appropriates the bones and refuses to return them, a group of Sioux begins stockpiling weapons at the Indian reservation in Choteau. The authorities eventually raid the cache, and Tyrone Little, an apparently Caucasian Vietnam veteran living on a farm outside of Choteau, is accused of having betrayed the rebels to the government. Tyrone and his lover, Delores Her Many Horses, a woman with a reputation who ``goes barefoot'' (doesn't use birth control), are at the center of the novel's nonpolitical story as well. Tyrone shoots another man, but the bullet passes through him and into Delores's womb, where it lodges in her fetus. Her son Joseph is born with a permanent scar on his chest, and many people ascribe his survival of that prenatal trauma to magical abilities they believe he still possesses. The many characters who speak their piece here make this a noisy novel, and Doane often has trouble differentiating their voices, even though each section begins with a name. (Some are in the first person and some in the third, but each gives a single character's point of view.) This blur of narrators is especially noticeable at crucial points in the plot—such as a shoot-out with federal agents—when the story is handed off rapidly from one character to the next. The longer chapters are more satisfying, and when he allows himself the space, Doane has a sharp method for bringing diverse parts together into a sinuous and surprising whole. Derring-do mixed with personal drama, sometimes bogged down by a crowded chorus. (Book-of-the-Month Club alternate selection)
Pub Date: June 3, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-42507-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1994
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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