Several distinct voices and points of view develop this multilayered narrative, reminiscent of jazz improvisations that...
Two feuding Brooklyn families—West Indian and American—come to terms with the past when a young great-grandson arrives in their midst.
Marshall, Brooklyn native and author of the critically acclaimed Brown Girl, Brownstones (1981) and Daughters (1991), explores the long-standing rivalry between West Indian immigrants and American-born blacks, telling the interwoven stories of several generations on both sides. The Paynes, ambitious strivers from the islands, don’t think much of the high-and-mighty McCullums, only one generation removed from their Virginia farm. Then young, musically talented Sonny-Rett Payne woos and wins Cherisse McCullum, the lovely, light-skinned daughter whose mother had hoped would become a movie star á la Dorothy Dandridge—and the battle lines are drawn. While their mothers never forgive it (or each other for allowing it), Sonny-Rett and Cherisse escape to Paris after WWII, and there Sonny-Rett becomes a world-famous jazz musician and composer, and Cherisse his happy wife. They’re accompanied by Hattie Carmichael, once a foster child in their close-knit community, who acts as Sonny’s manager and the family factotum. The expatriate Paynes thrive until Sonny’s descent many years later into drug abuse and Cherisse’s subsequent death from breast cancer. Their wayward daughter JoJo has a fling with a street vendor from Cameroon, which results in a son, named after his grandfather. Hattie eventually brings the boy to visit his elderly American relatives, who are still struggling to keep up appearances in their rapidly gentrifying neighborhood—and still clinging to their dimly remembered fury over the long-ago feud.
Several distinct voices and points of view develop this multilayered narrative, reminiscent of jazz improvisations that explore a melody in different ways. But Marshall’s undisciplined prose doesn’t have the sensual immediacy of music: ultimately the effect is more confusing than lyrical.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-87283-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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