A first US appearance for a Guardian Fiction Award winner who turns surfingon British waves, no lessinto a sustained but strained metaphor of love and loss as a young man becomes reconciled with his mother after a lengthy separation. Duncan Blaine was ten when his father died in a gruesome accident. Afterward, his mother, unable to ``cope with the nightmares that followed, shopping, other people's kitchens''or, it seems, with Duncanleft the boy with her sister ``and disappeared off the face of the earth.'' For years afterward, surfing the local waves became Duncan's only antidote for the memories of the happy family he once had. His surfing interest had been sparked when, at seven, he saw a man catch each wave with perfect balance. It was his father who made him his first ``board,'' and from then on Duncan was hooked. Now, on his 19th birthday, a card arrives from his mother with a Cornwall addressa sign that she now wants to see him? Indeed she does. She's leaving soon for Canada, where she's to marry Clive, a cardiologist who saved her from committing suicide at Clapham Junction, and she wants ``to say goodbye, and properly this time''a response that doesn't exactly comfort Duncan, who's felt rejected all these years. But as he tries to understand and forgive his mother, he meets Clive; begins an affair with hotel receptionist Estelle; offers deep thoughts on surfing; and even does a bit to clear his head. His mother, meanwhile, torn between the past, which Duncan evokes, and a future in a strange place, resolves the conflict predictably. Duncan grieves, but with surfing and Estelle's love, he'll survive: ``...life might be a bastard, but that's no reason to deny it a wedding.'' More profound than the Beach Boys but also more pretentious. Not a perfect wave, but surfers might be charmed.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-340-60659-2
Page Count: 218
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1995
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
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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