A too-perfect protagonist stifles this story’s energy.
In Oppitz’s (The Green Monster, 2011) novel, a young man finds an unusual calling as a river guide.
Robbie Oliver Jasper seems to have everything that he could want—he’s wealthy, handsome, and athletic, and he has a genius-level intellect, a photographic memory, and a promised place in Kansas State University’s veterinary program. However, he isn’t happy, as he feels controlled by his mother and father, who frequently ignore his opinions. Following his high school graduation, he and his parents decide to try to reconnect by taking a canoe trip on the Rio Grande. Just as they start to mend their relationship, a freak flood overturns their boats, and both of Robbie’s parents drown and get washed away. But Robbie is saved by a man named ST, a professional river guide. The teenager finds that he envies ST’s freedom, so he decides to become a river rat himself. Taking the nickname “ROJ,” he joins ST’s group and learns their skills on the very same body of water where his parents died. As he guides his own clients, he provides them with business advice that many find compelling. When someone from Robbie’s hometown arrives in search of him, he must decide how his old and new lives fit together. This novel provides readers a good understanding of the life of a river guide as well as a strong argument for the benefits of a simple life. However, the main character’s implausibility makes it difficult to take the story seriously. Robbie, who speaks in stilted dialogue, comes off as overly adult; he also has the uncanny ability to convince adults to do his bidding, as when he tells a Park Service officer of his river-rat plans: “Judd, I have you to thank for all this to happen....If anyone inquires about me or my whereabouts, tell them I am out of touch for the time being.” He’s never shown to have any flaws, and his varied expertise and abilities seem almost superhuman, particularly for a teenager. As a result, there’s no sense that Robbie really develops as a character.
A too-perfect protagonist stifles this story’s energy.Pub Date: July 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5434-3502-3
Page Count: 356
Publisher: XlibrisUS
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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