In his first novel, historian Clifford (Retreat from China, not reviewed) sets fictional characters in motion against the backdrop of Shanghai during two explosive historical moments: 1989 and 1925-27. Harvard Chinese history PhD Matthew Walker teaches at a small northern Massachusetts college and hopes that the book he's working on about Shanghai will boost his chances for tenure. Returning to the city in 1989 to complete his research, Matthew has also promised to find out what happened to his girlfriend Laura's great- uncle Simon, a writer who disappeared from Shanghai in 1927, just after a Communist uprising was put down by the Nationalists. Against a contemporary background of student cries for democracy in Tiananmen Square, Matthew is gradually compelled to take a political stand, as was Simon, who, we discover from the diary he kept (interwoven in the text with Matthew's adventures), led a double life. Clifford compellingly describes the charged atmosphere of 1920s-era Shanghai—filled with revolutionaries, foreign police, spies, and drug lords—and offers thoughtful insights into Chinese character, language, and politics. But the author is better at placing people in a historical context than evoking personal dramas: The scenes between Matthew and Laura before he leaves for Shanghai drag on for too long, as does the build-up to an explanation of Simon's significance, although the pacing picks up once chunks of the writer's past are revealed. At times Clifford's prose is gratifyingly reflective, even lyrical, but more often it has a dry academic tone. Like a Chinese painting in which humans seem dwarfed by a vast natural backdrop, the book works as a social study rather than a portrait of individual characters. A rewarding read for those curious about China, but not good enough for people who expect more from fiction than a history lesson.
Pub Date: June 6, 1994
ISBN: 0-345-38149-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1994
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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