Cody's second effort, after The Stolen Child (1995), is a novel of emotional concision and deeply felt beauty that's capable of recalling Ian McEwan and Raymond Carver. Through the focusing and refocusing lens of a fragile sensibility, narrator Will Ross, at age 37, looks back through his life and wonders about its future. In a style that perfectly communicates his sensation of being trapped in a downward spiral of fear and uninvited memories, he recollects growing up in a working-class family in the Boston suburbs. While still a young adult, Will was institutionalized—unable to shake off a paranoid obsession with serial killers—and this memory, in Cody's crisp and simple prose, merges seamlessly with others, as in a passage on his family's lack of money that turns into a haunting meditation on his father's death. Will spends his late 20s drifting, trying to sort out his empathies, before moving to Ithaca, where he enters the writing program at Cornell, falls in with an ambivalent bisexual, then eventually ends up with the woman he marries—bringing him, in the novel's present time, to wonder how he might go about explaining his life to the child he and she are trying to have. His thoughts include memories of old girlfriends and recollections of bull sessions with childhood buddies, and repeatedly he imagines what his life may be like in old age: possibilities that range from an aged Will sick and shivering in seedy hovels to tableaus of domestic bliss and security. Sometimes evocative of Hemingway, Cody's prose is crisp, sinuous, and simple, yet also densely layered, like the James Joyce of Dubliners. Cody is one of our rare contemporary authors legitimately consumed by the big questions- -love, death, faith, sex—and he has the talent to give those questions a rightful, elegant due. Spare, dignified, relentlessly intelligent prose fiction. (First serial to Harper's)
Pub Date: March 15, 1996
ISBN: 1-880909-44-8
Page Count: 252
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1996
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
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
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