Desperate housewives, Colonial-style.
The ghost of a love affair, excavated from long-forgotten letters.
Two Jameses and two Hannahs make for heated emotions in this ambitious historical drama that attempts, with mixed success, to inject some illicit romance into the lives of long-dead American noblemen. Filling in the gaps in the historical record is usually an exercise for academics. But Wexler, a former Supreme Court law clerk, has devoted considerable effort to shedding light on a minor historical controversy with a well-researched, if long-winded, work of fiction. Her novel inspired an article Wexler composed for The American Scholar about the lives and wives of two early justices of the United States Supreme Court, James Iredell and James Wilson. The book extends the article’s intriguing premise that Iredell, a Revolutionary War essayist who was appointed to the bench by George Washington, strayed into a not-altogether-indiscreet relationship with Wilson’s wife. Here, Hannah Gray Wilson is a young, attractive and emotional socialite who beguiles the much older man with her coquettish charms. Wexler imagines, based on a thin thread of historical evidence in her letters, that the affair did not sit well with Iredell’s pathologically shy wife (also named Hannah). The story of Mr. Iredell and Mrs. Wilson’s clandestine relationship is revealed through the fictional diaries of both Hannahs, punctuated with the real letters sent between the husbands and their wives, as well as occasional observations by other historical figures, like a young John Quincy Adams. Wexler has absorbed the language, rhythm and nuances of the letters to such a degree that her narrative flows together with them seamlessly. For those captivated by historical drama, this novel experiment may well be tempting, and devotees of Supreme Court history will find much to absorb. There is some interesting interplay between the two judges–friends by all accounts–trying to keep the nation on a steady course as they struggle to keep their own houses in order. The hysterics of their tempestuous wives (“She is here, in my own House–a Viper in the nest”), however, are overly melodramatic at times.
Desperate housewives, Colonial-style.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-6151-3516-8
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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