From the late Scottish author Gunn (d. 1973), another novel set in the chillingly pristine and seacoast landscapes (Young Art and Old Hector, 1991, etc.). Here, a young boy of 12 in a poor fishing village survives family crises and his own emotive tides and turns: a father at the mercy of a storm at sea; the departure of an older brother; a mother's near-fatal illness—and, of course, a nagging awareness of sexual attraction. Again, Gunn writes with a scowling intensity when he strains at a visual prize (``she could feel the angles of the old drystone dykes of the north in her own joints...''), and he goes after the most elusive of sensual bangs (``an oily brown taste'' is the mix of tea and meat). But when the author takes on the terror and majesty of a stormy sea, his statuesque, somewhat idealized people and their domestic concerns are an appropriate complementary landscape. The village watches in awe and fear as at last the boats come in, then as a wave lifts boat and men to thunder on the break and recede: ``White-flecked, like a great skin, the whole body of water could be seen swaying out to sea.'' Strong stuff, Men of Arran fashion, but affecting also is Gunn's reading of the changing moods in one family as an 18-year-old brother leaves for Australia: the close last dinner, the night's wild fling with piper and poaching, the breakfast (``already part of the journey''), the public goodbye, and the final, private griefs. Then there's the agony of the mother's illness (including ponderous metaphysical speculation) and some peeks (from a tree) at innocent love-play. The shuttered passions of an adolescent, in a stoic, loyal, closemouthed community, point to the possibilities of adulthood: ``All at once he started running...his bare legs twinkling across the field of the dawn.'' Purple—yes, a shade, but Gunn's sea is a deep blue, then furious white and mighty and real.
Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1993
ISBN: 0-8027-1228-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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