Guest’s first novel follows one man’s journey across continents and out of an ordinary life.
Mitch Nevin hasn’t heard from his best friend, Mark Reddox, in four months; as it turns out, neither has Mark’s own wife, Kiyomi. Mitch, a lifelong resident of Canada who has been abroad only once, is poring over communications from Mark. Unlike Mitch, Mark is a world traveler. He spent his youth backpacking from place to place, once writing to Mitch: “All travel undertaken for adventure is in fact a little suicide. Every journey begun without a set schedule or return ticket is an attempt to separate the umbilical cord that ties us to life, as we know it (ha ha), and propel us into the infinite, the endless expanse of gray ocean, or, if you are theologically inclined, into either a trance of clouds or a lake of fire. I expect that I’ll be committing these little suicides until… well, until I die.” Apparently abandoning his little suicides, Mark settled in Japan, marrying, fathering a child, divorcing, remarrying and becoming a father again. Mitch, whose quiet pleasures consist of photography, golf and the clutter in his studio, receives dispatches from Mark over the years as Mitch leads a thoroughly conventional life with his own wife and their dog in the suburbs. Now that Mark is missing, Mark undertakes detective work from Canada, but that can only go so far—until the sale of some of his photography allows him to fund a trip to Japan, where Mark lived for 20 years, and eventually to the Philippines, where Mark disappeared. In Japan, Mitch finds that Riku, Mark’s first child, is in a coma and may not recover. His family is reeling in Mark’s absence. Mitch traces Mark to a city in the Philippines that is a hot spot of sex tourism. In his search for his friend, Mitch befriends Vera, a woman working as an escort who makes him feel like no one, not even his own wife, has been able to do in years. Finally, Mitch traces Mark to a Christian mission for the care of impoverished children. What he finds there challenges his image of Mark as a seasoned world traveler with a life worth envying. Guest’s characters are easy to identify with, even when their circumstances are alien; he treats the domestic melodrama of a beloved dog’s death with the same gravity he uses to describe a young man in an interminable coma. Despite the wild chain of coincidences that leads Mitch to Mark, the book stays grounded and realistic; the unlikely doesn’t seem unbelievable. On top of a compelling narrative and tidy prose, Guest offers keen insight into the dynamics of male-female relationships, the conflicts between different cultures, and the contrast between aspirations and reality.
As much a philosophical novel as a travel story, Guest’s first book is well worth a read.
Pub Date: March 31, 2014
ISBN: 978-1497419964
Page Count: 252
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2014
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 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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