A fine debut, unsettling and magical.
Elegant prose distinguishes a first novel set in modern Ireland that reads like a reclaimed folktale.
Narrator Clodagh begins the story with her own birth, a sad affair dominated by the loneliness of her mother, Agatha. As a teenager, Agatha slept in caves and wandered the seaside fields of Frank Sheehy's estate. Sickly, frail Frank fell in love with the white-haired wandering girl, scrubbed the calluses off her feet, and married her. But, as Clodagh states in the opening, Agatha "was never easy in the world of houses," which helps explain why her neighbors began saying she wasn't a woman at all but a selkie: a seal lured from the sea by the love of a man, a selkie sheds her animal skin for a moment of passion and is doomed to the land until she can reclaim her skin, traditionally hidden by the new husband. When Frank dies, pregnant Agatha is sent to a grand house far away to raise Clodagh and her ailing twin, Mare. Clodagh uses the selkie myth to explain her mother's strange behavior: Agatha's penchant for wandering the cliffs and violent shoreline, for closing up the expansive house and living roughly in the kitchen, for disappearing at night wearing a sealskin dress bedecked with shells. There may be a simpler explanation: born to tinkers, Agatha longs for their unsettled life of traveling by horse-drawn caravan from town to town selling bits of pottery and ephemera. Mare dies, and Agatha becomes more unhinged and distant, spending days at a time at the tinker's camp, where Clodagh is sure she has a lover. One day, as Clodagh watches, Agatha returns to the sea. Sent to boarding school, Clodagh uses music to mend her sorrow, but the history of the shadowy Agatha calls to her when she meets a beautiful tinker man and follows him to become his lover. When he reveals startling secrets about himself and Agatha, the story becomes less mythic—and far more tragic.
A fine debut, unsettling and magical.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7432-0323-2
Page Count: 318
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
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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