Smith knows the Civil War in his bones, and his novel will leave readers emotionally drained but grateful.
This lean Civil War sequel packs in more history and raw emotion than a 600-page epic.
Novelist Smith (Home Again, 2014) continues the story of Zach Harkin, a Union sharpshooter who was traumatized when he killed Confederate sharpshooter Jack Kavandish. This left Zach unfit for service; he was mustered out but resolved to find Jack’s widow and return his journal to her, along with her picture that Jack carried. An older Zach tells the story to Chris Martin, an enterprising young reporter from Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World who shows up in Zach’s Knoxville, Tennessee, gun shop in 1908. In the fall of 1863, Zach slipped away from home to pursue his quest, do or die. Confederate sorties (Tennessee was a border state) were one danger, but Union soldiers, who assume he’s a deserter, could be just as bad. After more than one close scrape, he wound up in Andersonville, the notorious Confederate prison in Georgia. We meet its notorious commandant, Henri Wirz, who was later hanged for war crimes. Zach-as-father-figure becomes a recurring motif: first, at Andersonville, he became the protector of young Beau Andrews, a bugle boy from Michigan; later, he became a real father to Kavandish’s son, Tom. With Wirz’s unwitting help, he did escape Andersonville. Then he was in the Deep South, which was more and more a lawless place, as he worked to find Jack’s farm; Gen. Sherman’s forces were coming through, and the “Home Guards,” as portrayed here, were little more than plunderers and rapists. Smith writes wonderfully and realistically, and one can hear the pacing and menace: “[Zach] could see the men’s eyes were wild, almost glazed over from drink. They sat heavy on their saddles, their heads not moving in unison with the horses’ movements. Zach braced for the worst.” Smith also knows as much about the guns of the era as a professional gunsmith and restorer. Readers will find themselves wincing and full of outrage at several turns of the plot; readers will hope—even assume—that the most sympathetic characters, whom they’ve come to love, will somehow manage to survive, but Smith often dashes such hope. One subplot, involving Martin standing up to the dictatorial Pulitzer, is either a bonus or a distraction, depending on the reader’s taste.
Smith knows the Civil War in his bones, and his novel will leave readers emotionally drained but grateful.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5303-7974-3
Page Count: 190
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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