A heartfelt exploration of brotherhood and the hardships of growing old.
Set in 1997, Mohrbacher’s (The Magic Fault, 2014) novel explores the reunion of two estranged brothers.
Even in their 60s, Nick and Ben don’t get along. A specialist in clinical psychology, Nick is a hedonist in California while Ben is a straight-edged academic in his hometown, Bismarck, North Dakota. Ben learns that Nick is ill and in assisted living. Not having seen him in 12 years, Ben reluctantly travels to San Mateo to visit him. But he has ulterior motives. Jeanne Marie, Ben’s wife, passed away, and he is convinced Nick knows something about the circumstances surrounding her death. On the brothers’ first night out, they meet two women: Bonnie and Joyce. Immediately, the four grow close, and both women help Ben take care of “Doctor Nick,” who often makes a scene. For example, the three heard Nick “smash a bottle, probably against the bathtub, and then another one, and then a third. He had finished all three. We could hear cabinets slamming.” Over the years, Nick became a miracle worker helping sundowners—people with dementia who grow uneasy as the day goes by—overcome their anxieties. Before Ben’s arrival, Nick fell into a diabetic coma and was found homeless and unconscious. He recovered but now suffers from severe memory loss. In several affecting scenes, Ben tries to reconstruct Nick’s memory by visiting Nick’s old haunts: a McDonald’s, his old apartment, a homeless shelter, and Stern Grove Park. Mohrbacher develops his characters with great attention to detail, though Ben’s reflections can feel redundant. For instance, Ben is often “after bigger things”—to understand his wife’s death—but the reader doesn’t get a resolution until much later in the book. Sometimes, however, hints of humanity break through the surface: Ben says, “and suddenly I felt lonelier than I’d ever felt.” The book could use more contemporary representations of women: they are caretakers, at home, innocent and sexually naïve, or dead. All except for Joyce, who dismisses the patriarchy—once. Though the ending feels rushed, the strength in the brothers’ newfound fraternity will move readers.
A heartfelt exploration of brotherhood and the hardships of growing old.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-9846603-5-3
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Keen Editions
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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