This often clinically detailed novel from Ignatieff (Asya, 1991; Blood and Belonging, p. 115) mourns a beloved parent and addresses various kinds of loss: of memory, of faith in conventional medicine, and of pieties. Narrated by the younger son, a philosophy professor, the novel, short-listed for the 1993 Booker Prize, is a personal search for answers to the big questions as well as those smaller mysteries that dog even the happiest families. The mother, now afflicted with Alzheimer's disease, was, in her prime, a woman of spirit, an artist who painted portraits, liked to go barefoot, and sang old Broadway songs as she worked. The father, an immigrant from Odessa, is a scientist with his own legacy, less lethal than his wife's genetic inheritance, but no less vitiating—a childhood that was never safe. And those fears have shaped his relationship with his two sons, who resented his apparent lack of imagination and his emphasis on having ``a profession and a pension.'' As his mother nears 60, the narrator observes puzzling changes in her: She no longer paints, and she has difficulty expressing herself—the long, wrenching decline into silence and nothingness has begun. His own marriage breaks down as he becomes obsessively involved in his mother's care. The elder brother, a neurophysician, appears to be more detached, but it's only a protective mechanism, and while their father's death brings the two brothers closer together, it doesn't really help the narrator. As he struggles to find some meaning in his mother's life, his own, and even in the disease (which he suspects he has inherited), he comes to believe that there is a ``pure and heartless reality beyond anything a living soul can comprehend.'' Disease not as a metaphor but as a prescription for living in a book that confronts our worst fears with bracing insight and finely tuned emotion. A tough read but worth it.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-374-25428-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
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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