A startlingly insightful and moving tale of the power and nebulousness of the past.
In Bouler’s debut novel, a reporter is tasked with covering the legacy of an infamous segregationist Southern politician and unravels the man’s—and the South’s—controversial past.
It’s 1999 when word gets out that Thomas Jefferson Davis, the four-time governor of the fictional Southern state of Escambia, is about to die, and reporter Rebecca Tanner is dispatched from Atlanta to cover the story. Davis rose to political prominence in the late 1950s by advocating for a restoration of Southern pride—and for segregation. In 1968, Davis parlayed his popularity into a presidential bid and did better than any other third-party candidate in modern American history. Some view his imprint on Escambia’s politics as a stain—a last gasping effort to maintain the bigoted supremacy of the white man. However, Gordon Halt, a well-known conservative journalist from a prominent newspaper family—his father ran an important periodical and won the Pulitzer Prize—saw Davis’ efforts as an attempt to preserve a way of life that, since the Civil War, had unjustly been under attack: “Gordon’s only goal had been to influence the Davis message on two points: that neither side, North or South, had perfect knowledge of what was best for the negro people and that the South had a special culture and way of life that deserved to be respected at the same time that its faults were addressed.” Then Tanner stumbles upon old recordings of interviews conducted with Billy Trask, Davis’ close aide, which seem to reveal that the governor turned a blind eye to, and may have quietly encouraged, violently racist groups that supported his political aspirations. Bouler adroitly weaves together two literary genres—a historical novel that’s clearly inspired by the infamous political career of Alabama Gov. George Wallace and a suspenseful crime drama. The story is full of delicately drawn characters: Halt, for example, is a staunch defender of a world that he despondently sees as vanishing, but he also squeamishly remembers the darker side of Davis as well as his own acrimonious political split with his father, who refused to support the governor. Tanner, meanwhile, is a natural reporter—intellectually curious and scrupulously rigorous—but she’s also young, a Midwesterner, and full of her own unexamined biases about the South. In the grand tradition of William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, Bouler anatomizes the entire history of the region, assessing its fatal flaws and its singular strengths. What emerges is not merely a sensitive, open-minded account of history, but also a profound reflection on the extraordinary difficulty of such historical remembrance. As Halt defensively observes: “It was a complicated time. I’m sure if he were not lying unconscious in that hospital, Governor Davis would say that he followed the people in that regard, more than he led them. But it’s a complex story. And it was half a century ago.” Overall, the author’s effort offers a rare combination of fictional daring and philosophical restraint.
A startlingly insightful and moving tale of the power and nebulousness of the past.Pub Date: March 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-692-08286-7
Page Count: 338
Publisher: Escambia Press
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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