A sentimental, heart-wrenching tale from novelist and story- writer Currey (The Wars of Heaven, 1990, Fatal Light, 1988, etc.) offers brief glimpses of a banjo player's path—though tragic—to fame and self-respect. A coal miner's son born poor but proud enough to take up the banjo to ease the worry of his widowed mother, Sapper Reeves is cut from the rough, durable broadcloth of American legend. At the opening of the novel, Reeves, in his 70s, takes a break from writing the songs for what will prove to be his capstone album and drives back to his hometown of Maxwell, West Virginia, reflecting on the origins of the Steel Creek Boys, a trio he formed in 1947 with his boyhood chum Estin Wyrell and the handsome, self-assured Leonard James. With Leonard on guitar and Wyrell on fiddle, the three left their jobs, wives, and infants to go in search of success, but found mostly misery, disappointment, and loneliness while performing at high-school socials and dingy roadhouses. The joys of playing country music are never enough to overcome the disappointments, as the trio are cheated by dishonest club owners, exploited by radio stations, and insulted by drunks. After a hostile audience beats them up and smashes their instruments, Reeves slips for several years into an alcoholic funk, losing the affections of his trusting wife, Riva, but not of his young son, Bob, who later joins the Marines, goes off to fight in Vietnam, and returns home physically and spiritually crippled. Reeves's early experience with failure helps him cope with his son's despair. Then an unexpected gift of a banjo from Wyrell, and Riva's cautious return, bring Reeves back to his music at a time when a younger generation is looking for heroes. More bitter than sweet, and frequently fogged by self-conscious Faulknerisms, but finally saved by a convincing depiction of the hard lives of its characters and the stubborn persistence of their modest hopes in the midst of loss.
Pub Date: May 27, 1997
ISBN: 0-395-52102-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1997
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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