Not especially profound, but a pleasing and well-written confection.
An English Candide wanders into 18th-century Lisbon. Complications ensue.
Voltaire’s hero had a sweet nature and kindly disposition, as well as a talent for getting into tight spots. Adam Hanaway, dubbed “Adam Runaway” early on, is a nice guy, too. His favorite book, Prince (The Great Circle, 1997) tells us, is Robinson Crusoe, and there’s a Crusoe-like quality to Adam, more or less marooned in Portugal after his father dies penniless and he’s sent off to earn a living in his uncle’s emporium. Soon Adam gets himself into trouble; he proves a social naïf among the dour English expatriates who come to tea, has an awkward run-in with a freed black whom he calls Wednesday, earns the dislike of his uncle’s closest assistant and butts heads with one Dom Jeronymo, who is in a position to make his life miserable. Indeed, Adam is positively dense at points, as when he decides to argue with Dom Jeronymo about “what sort of religion was being served by the excesses of the 'so-called Holy Office,’ ” that office being the seat of the Inquisition, with which the Dom is a familiar. Dom Jeronymo tries to inform Adam, ever so gently, that autos-da-fé are not really meant to kill people but to celebrate the return of sinners to the arms of the church. Unconvinced, Adam blithely goes about his rounds, not quite comprehending how his slight will affect the lives of those around him—including, by now, a lovely young lass called Maria Beatriz. Other lovely lasses introduce bits of intrigue into the stew, but it takes a worldly compatriot to set him up for a bigger fall. Some of Prince’s story can be seen coming from a long way away, but in general the tale carves an entertainingly twisty-and-turny path that plays on the foibles of youth and age and hints at some of the religious tensions that were tearing Europe apart at the dawn of the modern era—oh, and that features some nice swordplay, too.
Not especially profound, but a pleasing and well-written confection.Pub Date: July 5, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-7101-7
Page Count: 496
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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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