A fine first novel from a writer with affecting wisdom.
Chalem, in his debut novella, looks at the role and limitations of art.
Elie Melach is a well-known, Egyptian-born Parisian artist who’s drifting quickly toward old age. He’s most famous for his black-and-purple painting The Children of Rwanda. The work was well-reviewed and sold for a healthy sum, but Melach feels somehow disgusted with his celebrated masterpiece. He now finds it difficult to produce anything, and he sets aside his canvases, still blank, thinking that they can’t be improved by his brush strokes. One day, he goes early to lunch and uncharacteristically orders a whiskey. Perhaps he’s just in a bad mood, but a creeping doubt settles over his mind, blocking out the myriad colors that make up his painter’s alphabet, and causing him to imagine only black. The conflicts of the world weigh heavily on him: Does any of his work matter, as he wallows in cafes while innocents die in a dozen wars around the globe? The newest turmoil is in Lebanon, where his fellow Jews are abetting massacres in Sabra and Shatila; he wonders: What is his part in that, his proper response? Must every artist chose between significance and happiness, or is the very notion of a choice the delusion of the creative mind? He tries to decide whether he is highly moral, tragically empathetic or just depressed. Family members, friends, employees and strangers wander in and out of Melach’s day, informing and reorienting his positions as either a witness or an active participant in life. Throughout the novel, the main character drifts about in a fine existential crisis, but it’s one that’s never boring. Chalem handles Melach with humor, compassion and openness that evokes the work of such authors as John Banville, Percival Everett and the late Alberto Moravia. His prose is a perfect mirror of his protagonist: unrushed, observant, musing, and belonging to a slightly earlier time. It pulls readers through its pages like a balloon on a string, leaving them buoyantly unaware of whatever inevitability awaits. This is a short book, but one that achieves grandeur through its smallness: The novella is the perfect medium for the story, and it makes a fine addition to the current renaissance of the format. Although this is Chalem’s debut publication, he’s a mature talent, and readers should take notice.
A fine first novel from a writer with affecting wisdom.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-1503257801
Page Count: 168
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 6, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
