On the Olympic Peninsula's Salish reservation, the disinterring of an evil shaman, whose soul has been immured in a giant cedar for 500 years, unleashes a torrent of deviltry among 20th-century loggers. Michael McTavish, head of Quinault Lumber, has won a contract to log acres of precious timber on the Quinault reservation, on the condition that he avoid the area marked off as sacred. But when someone moves the marker to exclude a particularly inviting cedar, Matt Swayle, Quinault's chief faller, promptly chainsaws the tree, releasing the patiently malevolent spirit of the magician Xulk and creating atmospheric disturbances that spook even Matt and his equally hard-bitten hound. Within hours, Lia Prefontaine, errant wife of local police chief Paul Prefontaine, has fallen victim to the fatal illusion that she can fly. Over the summer the calamities continue: A loading dock mysteriously catches fire; a tour guide disappears from the group she was leading; a bear confronted by loggers flees into the woods only to return with unwonted savagery a few minutes later. But the most painful casualty is Mike McTavish, claimed by a modern-day witch called Aminte as the consort who can stand in for Xulk himself. Reeling from his death, Mike's widow, Hannah, battles to keep Quinault afloat despite opposition from her absent partner and the obligatory tree-huggers. Yet first-novelist Stokes (The Castrated Woman: What Your Doctor Won't Tell You About Hysterectomy, 1986), whose sympathies are really with the environmentalists, pairs Hannah with another equally strong heroine, Paul's twin sister, Jordan Tidewater, the acting tribal sheriff descended from Xulk's nemesis—a woman who gradually discovers and accepts in herself the primeval powers needed to defeat Xulk once again. The Clan of the Cave Bear meets Twin Peaks. Rangy and even majestic, though it's hard to take it quite as seriously as the principals do.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-85633-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1995
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
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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