Poet Callen's first novel, set at the turn of the century, tells of the love and friendship between two women—a story that, for all its up-to-date politics, is really an old-fashioned celebration of its title virtue. Lena and Will Kaiser, longtime residents of Charity, South Dakota, have always stuck by each other, despite their childless marriage, Will's drinking problems, and his loutish, quarrelsome family. When a drunken Will is arrested after he is observed leaving the scene of his father's murder, no one believes that this peaceable man is actually the killer, but Lena lacks the money to hire a lawyer or post bail. Enter Gustie Roemer, a schoolteacher recently arrived from back east. Unbeknownst to the community, Gustie traveled to South Dakota with her ailing lover, Clare, who died shortly after arriving. Still mourning Clare, Gustie is tormented by nightmares that are dispelled only by hanging the dead woman's nightgown near her bed. Though preoccupied with her own sorrow, Gustie is moved to become the Kaisers' secret benefactor, using Clare's inheritance to buy Lena groceries and to get Will out of jail. Meanwhile, Gustie has become acquainted with Dorcas, an elderly Sioux woman, and her beautiful, troubled granddaughter Jordis, who still bears scars from the beatings white teachers gave her for youthful rebelliousness. Gustie's loyalties are torn as she and Jordis fall in love, despite Gustie's deepening friendship with Lena, who can't understand Gustie's closeness to Jordis and the Indian community. But as Kaiser family tensions unfold, Lena learns the virtues of tolerance and kindness, while Gustie finds the strength to confront her own past. Despite a few excessively lyrical flourishes, an unusually satisfying tale, combining an engrossing mystery, a lovingly etched portrait of a community, and an appreciation for the moral resilience of strong women.
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-82942-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1997
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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