Despite engaging moments, Simon’s didactic tone strains readers’ patience.
Outrage against a mental-health system no longer in service is the guiding force in this pointedly uplifting love story from novelist and memoirist Simon (Riding the Bus with My Sister, 2002, which became a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie) about a deaf African-American man and a mentally disabled woman who meet in a Dickensian mental institution in the 1960s and overcome all obstacles through force of will and spiritual goodness.
In 1968, childless retired schoolteacher Martha briefly gives shelter to Lynnie and Homan, runaways from the residential facility in northern Pennsylvania, until the corrupt head doctor and his henchmen track them down. Homan gets away. Lynnie is taken back in a straightjacket, but the authorities don’t know about her newborn baby, delivered by Homan but the product of a rape. Keeping her promise to Lynnie, Martha hides infant Julia with the help of various former students and eventually raises her as her own granddaughter. Over the next four decades, Homan never ceases to long for Lynnie and the baby. Deaf since a childhood fever, he uses his street smarts, spiritual wisdom and mechanical skills to survive a picaresque series of adventures until he lands in California, where he more than prospers. Meanwhile, Lynnie remains in what she calls “the bad place,” where she was placed as a child by a middle-class parent embarrassed at her lack of cognitive skills. Fortunately, saintly staff member Alice helps Lynnie develop her artistic talent and keeps track of Julia through one of Martha’s students. The publication of an exposé on “the bad place” changes conditions in the late '70s. Gradually Lynnie learns to talk. She reunites with her beloved older sister Hannah, who sells Lynnie’s art in the gallery she runs. Now living independently, Lynnie still longs for Homan and Julia. The question is not if but how they will unite (and why resourceful Homan takes so long).
Despite engaging moments, Simon’s didactic tone strains readers’ patience.Pub Date: May 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-446-57446-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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 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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