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BREATHE AT EVERY OTHER STROKE

STORIES

A debut collection from a remarkably empathetic and versatile new talent. Many of the 11 stories collected here are set in a carefully delineated Silicon Valley where ``ordinary'' characters—a deliveryman, a harried young gardener, two plucky children of a real-estate salesman and his wife—find deliverance from fear and stasis. In ``Jump, Jack,'' the protagonist reluctantly agrees to take his frightened five-year-old grandson on a camping trip. Jack has only recently given up life as a vagrant and taken a job as a deliveryman, and now finds (to his mingled relief and dismay) while revisiting one of his old haunts with his grandson that the violence that once defined his life has departed. In ``Only the Lonely Heart,'' a generous, caring woman always unlucky in love opens her home to an ex-boyfriend's young son and his pregnant girlfriend, gaining a new baby to raise as well as some true understanding of her own needs. ``Chinese Tulip'' tracks 24 hours in the life of an overworked Palo Alto landscape gardener named Ruth, whose partner Louise is in the hospital giving birth to her first child (and having a hard time of it) and whose teenage helper LeFawn is in an emotional crisis. Nevertheless, after she rescues Mrs. Ulrich's hedges and Mr. Hinckly's tulip bed, Ruth resuscitates her own dreams of starting a mail-order tulip business. In ``You Can See Jupiter with the Naked Eye if You Know Where to Look,'' a 12-year-old boy and his 10-year-old sister, while attempting to aid their hapless father, have an unexpected encounter with a motorcycle gang in the hills above their town. And, finally, in one of several stories dealing with eccentric fathers and their bewildered adult sons, ``Breathe at Every Other Stroke'' shows Stewart, whose alcoholic father long ago drowned in Lake Washington, at last learning to swim when he becomes a father himself. A rich, readable, wonderfully varied collection.

Pub Date: May 20, 1996

ISBN: 0-8050-4385-3

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Henry Holt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1996

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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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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

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.

Pub Date: July 11, 1960

ISBN: 0060935464

Page Count: 323

Publisher: Lippincott

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960

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