An often illuminating novel that lays bare the societal constraints faced by generations of women and the stark realities...
Wright (Broken Strings, 2013, etc.) crafts a multigenerational tale centered on the women in one Scottish-American family.
As the novel opens in 1912, Jessie Menzies has just graduated from high school in the small Scottish town of Leven. The festivities are short-lived, however, as she learns that her Aunt Grace has died in the United States, leaving behind a husband and children. In short order, Jessie travels there to help with the kids—a job that has her putting down roots in the Vermont town of Cherry Valley. Jessie starts teaching English to new immigrants and eventually forges a relationship with a Polish man, leading to a daughter, Grace, being born out of wedlock. The story is divided into four parts, and the first two trace Jessie’s story as she builds a life in the small town with assorted, lively friends and family. Victoria, one of the “babies” Jessie came to look after, narrates the third part, set mostly during World War II. Tired of life in small-town America, Vicky has an affair with a married college professor and becomes a pilot to help the war effort in Europe. The story of Grace, Jessie’s love child, makes up the last part of the novel. Allusions to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland surface throughout; Vicky, for example, with her sheer will and zest for life, is depicted as the story’s “Red Queen.” But while Lewis Carroll might have stated in that tale that “Queens never make bargains,” the author effectively shows how the Menzies women have no such luck. Constrained by the demands of family, time and place, even the one weapon they have—sexuality—often backfires. Yet Wright shows how they constantly adapt to unyielding situations and somehow manage to make their places in society. The novel ends just after the end of World War II, a celebratory time that made way for new beginnings; the story concludes with this ray of hope as the next generation gets ready to take over the spotlight.
An often illuminating novel that lays bare the societal constraints faced by generations of women and the stark realities they bore with grace.Pub Date: April 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-1935922476
Page Count: 234
Publisher: Red Barn Books of Vermont
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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
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