A profound, dramatic, and emotionally resonant book.
Peterson (Snow-Blind, 2018) offers a pair of stories about characters coming to terms with death.
In “A Sight to See,” the shorter of this book’s two narratives, Adam is one of four astronauts on a one-way flight to Mars. When something collides with the spaceship, his three companions die, and Adam’s injury renders him blind. As the ship continues its course to the red planet, he sits alone in darkness and periodically communicates with Mission Control. He accepted the mission knowing that he would never again see his wife, Penny, but as he awaits what he believes is an imminent demise, he debates whether he made the right decision. In “The Boatman,” Charles is a professional guide for people who wish to die. He works at a company that constructs “death dreams,” in which people can choose the specific manner of their passing. He keeps his job a secret from his father, who wouldn’t approve; Charles’ mother committed suicide a decade earlier. But his dad isn’t well himself, and he may soon decide how he wants to pass on—with or without Charles’ guidance. Peterson’s death-centered stories, while occasionally gloomy, are still filled with hope. The author shows how Adam, for instance, doesn’t fear his demise, which he seems to view as a journey’s end; although his longing for Penny is sorrowful, he achieves a sense of closure before the tale concludes. Similarly, “death dreams” allow characters to experience happiness or heroism before they die. At times, the author’s lyrical prose cushions the bleaker concepts; for example, Adam believes that the Earth’s first living cell is continually reborn in each living thing: “We are an unbroken echo of all life before us,” he muses, “locked in a closed-loop system of death and resurrection.” Overall, Peterson’s stories promote an appreciation of life—although some readers may still shed tears.
A profound, dramatic, and emotionally resonant book.Pub Date: March 21, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-09-119910-1
Page Count: 85
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Jan. 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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