Morais writes with sensitivity and insight about the many ways American life challenges the Reverend Oda’s equanimity.
A gentle Buddhist priest from Japan is given the task of building a temple in the Little Calabria section of Brooklyn, and the results are both calamitous and sweet.
Before the move, Reverend Seido Oda had already lived a full and tragic life, having dealt with his father’s mental illness and his brother’s death by fire. He grew up in a remote and rural setting and, at the age of 11, was apprenticed to the monks in the Headwater Sect (a fictional creation of Morais) at a local Buddhist temple. Despite his personal and familial difficulties, for 30 years Oda lives a relatively placid life, until his superior requests that he travel thousands of miles to oversee the building of a new temple in the strange urban landscape of Brooklyn. Once there, Oda comes in contact with a very American form of Buddhism, one in which he’s casually referred to as “Rev” or “the Reverend O.” Oda understandably has difficulty adapting to the exigencies of his new life. He meets Laura, a shellacked blonde, who is into New Age crystals and “channeling the Buddha’s voice during evening prayer.” He also encounters Mr. Dolan, who’s been giving a series of lectures on Buddhism based in part on Buddhism for Dummies. The greatest surprise awaiting Oda is a relationship that he develops with Jennifer, whose casual demeanor belies an engaging intellect (she has a doctorate in Italian and has been translating Boccacio) and a sincere interest in Buddhist texts. They begin a sexual relationship that comes as a surprise more to Oda than to Jennifer. Oda finds he has to balance the delicacy of his feelings for Jennifer with his much more pragmatic connection to Mr. Symes, the hardheaded American businessman who’s a major fundraiser for the temple.
Morais writes with sensitivity and insight about the many ways American life challenges the Reverend Oda’s equanimity.Pub Date: July 17, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6922-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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 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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