The five inventive tales in this unusual collection speak to each other across time and space, but it takes a while for the reader to realize the subtle connections here. The very point of Van Winckel's second volume of stories (Limited Lifetime Warranty, 1994) is that there's no obvious prime mover to events—even if everything that happens is a consequence of a single moment. Everything begins, sort of, with ``Hearsay,'' in which a traveling ventriloquist recalls a brief affair with a native gypsy girl in Idaho whose one-night with the Ganje (non- gypsy) has tragic results for her and the brother who avenges her honor. In ``Ever After,'' a divorcÇe struck by lightning loses her hands, and is shrewdly counseled about her future by two old gypsy women in her convalescent home—they happen to be aunts of the girl from ``Hearsay.'' Meanwhile, in ``Whatever Shines,'' the sister-in- law of the tragic gypsy from ``Hearsay'' turns up in Milwaukee, where she runs away from an arranged marriage, goes to school, and lives with a group of girls who harbor draft-dodgers on their way to Canada. The gypsy boy who avenged his sister escapes to Mexico (in ``Cine HorriblÇ''), where he makes his living showing movies throughout the countryside until one of them, Dracula, is very poorly received by the horrified locals. He also suffers from visions of his wronged sister, who dies while giving birth the son of the ventriloquist. The longest and wildest story, ``Taking Leave,'' includes the voice of that very child years later, now grown and living in Milwaukee, who has no knowledge of his real parents. He eventually finds his calling in scavenging, using the materials he discovers to create art. The marime (the defiled) who people these intriguing stories share voices and visions; however confusing it at first seems, there's great pleasure in discovering the connections here. Van Winckel demands and deserves a careful reading.
Pub Date: April 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-8262-1091-0
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Univ. of Missouri
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1997
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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