Octogenarian Sage debuts with 14 wry and moving tales, all marked by their depth of perception into the workings of the human heart. This slim volume revels in the complexities of the simple life, parading forth an assortment of country rascals and city sophisticates encountering the challenges inherent in growing up and growing old. Two stories, equal in their eloquence and sassy spirit, fondly recall characters from the narrator's past: ``Sunday School on the Chicaqua'' remembers Bay, who moved from Mississippi to the Yankee North long ago, and is now impromptu chef of the Sunday Schoolthat is, the cottage where the local men gather to drink, tell tall tales, and play poker while their wives and children attend church. The story meanders effortlessly, winding in and out of wise old Bay's anecdotes on the river. ``Room 409'' portrays a couple of Depression-era college students living the high life in San Francisco off Hadley's family fortune. Hadley and Jackson meet on college steps where they form a fast and true friendship, which turns into romance once a week in room 409 of the swankiest hotel. Now in his 80s, Jackson recalls the bittersweet affair on notice of Hadley's death, realizing too late what he had thrown away. Meanwhile, ``Bib Overalls'' and ``Moe's 3 Birds'' tell sprightly tales of adolescent romanceMoe is ``ugly as mud and not too bright but she sure as hell knew what it was with boys and girls'' and was also the town's sharpshooter, producing inestimable pride in her 13-year-old beau. Other offerings present a darker panorama: a man tries to get through Czech customs with his wife's ashes; a mother who spies on her daughter's front-porch fumblings later confronts the boyfriend, offering her own brand of advice and comfort. Piercing observations paired with wonderfully comic phrasing: small gems from a master of the form.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-57003-064-2
Page Count: 130
Publisher: Univ. of South Carolina
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1995
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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