A fun, original novel about seeing culture through foreign eyes.
The quirky adventures of a Frenchman in America.
Poet, novelist and French-English translator Kent has a unique character in Albert Nostran. He was introduced in The Big Jiggety (2005), a coming-of-age yarn that followed the ill-prepared French-born American’s struggle through collegiate life in Montana and Maine in the 1970s. Here, Kent vibrantly continues Nostran’s chronicles as a pensive college senior double-majoring in English and art and pondering what’s sure to be “a field of question marks” upon graduation. He continues to live in the freshman Hollister Hall dormitory suite shared with plucky roommate Willy Lee. Only dabbling in photography, Nostran is anxious about postgraduation job prospects, and with little girlfriend experience beyond Sabine back in his native France, his mind becomes unnecessarily preoccupied with Willy’s sexuality. A parade of peripheral characters marches through Kent’s dialogue-driven narrative, most tapping into the uncertainty of postcollege life. Some, such as randy professor DeBaal, are eager to explore Nostran’s more carnal desires. Nostran’s breaks are spent hitchhiking to Stone Harbor, Massachusetts, where his paranoid, brutish American father once enjoyed a livelihood as a journalist for Thyme Magazine. His mother, having sold the family home in France to relocate to Stone Harbor, is unimpressed with the seaside town’s alcohol restrictions, but once settled in, the Nostran family accepts America as their new home while Albert continues his job-seeking exploits amid the clash of cultures. The text features a surfeit of introspective musings that add humor and creative energy to Kent’s oddly addictive narrative. Also helping is a hodgepodge of well-placed references to classic American literature and abstract art history. Setting the novel in motion early is a comical scene in which the reluctant protagonist is lightheartedly coerced into allowing Willy to become his roommate because “only weird guys are worth hanging out with.” This cast of eccentrics is worth spending time with as well.
A fun, original novel about seeing culture through foreign eyes.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2012
ISBN: 978-1479725083
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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