But because things keep coming back to Amos’s story, The Genius of the Sea never, for all the psychoanalysis going on, quite...
A troubled social worker finds solace in the tall tales of a welfare fraud.
London has never seemed so depressing. As presented by British second-novelist Murr (The Boy, 1998), the city is a rain-soaked heap of estate flats, sanitariums, and pubs populated mostly by the wretched, irredeemably sarcastic, or those on the verge of insanity. Daniel Mulvaugh is the tortured soul at story’s center, a social worker who seems to be drawn to his work through some self-flagellating sense of despair and regret over his poorly lived life. Throughout, he’s haunted by memories of how he never truly let his mother feel his love before her death, how he essentially abandoned his childhood friend, and how he might have driven his wife, Sally, to the nervous breakdown she’s currently recovering from. The only thing providing him with a modicum of stability is, oddly enough, a stranger. Amos is an old man who’s been receiving fraudulent welfare checks (“the king’s shilling,” as he grandiloquently refers to it) and living in the old estate flat where Daniel grew up and his mother died. Determined at first to expose Amos, Daniel is quickly sucked in by the man’s stories of his youth, his years in the merchant marine, and an impossibly operatic, tragic and action-filled account of love, loss, and murder. Murr’s narrative swings from place to place—from Daniel’s office (where he actually tries to care about the plights of the wrecked souls who come before him) to the pub where he and his co-workers hang out, then on to Amos’s flat and Sally’s room at the sanitarium. Murr’s prose, meantime, is full to bursting with ripe, powerful imagery, and he has an almost uncanny sense for the mechanics of group conversation.
But because things keep coming back to Amos’s story, The Genius of the Sea never, for all the psychoanalysis going on, quite gets a bead on Daniel.Pub Date: June 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-3795-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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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