Despite quibbles, a fine read that lays bare a less-than-glorious side of America’s recent past. Fans of courtroom dramas...
A detail-rich novel about an Arizona murder trial, prejudice, and American culture in the late 1950s.
Without question, María Sánchez Curry killed her husband, Ben, with whom she fought all the time. Indeed, she “had never seen him so peaceful” as when he lay dead with a kitchen knife in his chest. María is arrested and charged with first-degree murder. She had feared for her life and insists she didn’t mean to kill Ben. Judge Morton assigns the unwilling Michael Shaw to defend her. Michael is a hard-drinking lawyer deeply unhappy with his wife, Jenny, and his job at his father’s law firm. But no matter, he says. “My clients never know I’m hung over. I’m that good.” The court assigns Antonia Teresa “Toni” García as a translator so that Spanish-speaking María and English-speaking Michael can understand each other. In time, Michael and Toni fall in love, with abundant complications following—their affair gets everyone’s notice, including his father’s and his wife’s. Viewpoints shift frequently, showing the deep anti-Mexican attitudes in the community. Many think the “white” Ben should never have married a Mexican anyway, that the Mexicans are just here in America to cook and clean. The courtroom scenes feel realistic, and many descriptions are beautifully done. There's plenty of back story, and the plot doesn't hurtle forward like a courtroom drama generally does. While these digressions slow the pace, they are never long, and they provide depth for the more important characters. María and Toni seem the most true-to-life, while Michael is the smart gringo attorney with more than the usual emotional baggage.
Despite quibbles, a fine read that lays bare a less-than-glorious side of America’s recent past. Fans of courtroom dramas will enjoy it as will anyone who enjoys a meaningful story.Pub Date: March 30, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-55885-823-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Arte Público
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
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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