New finesse on an old theme, sure to grab readers’ attention.
A group of residents in a senior living facility faces a host of obstacles in Holden’s inventive collection of vignettes.
Norris Mae Ledbetter is a resident at the Wicklow Senior Living Center, also known as La Belle Residence. While her caregiver, Janice, tends to her, Norris Mae conducts her own inner dialogue, reliving the classic books she once memorized in her days as a librarian. Though Janice and Norris Mae are usually inches apart, they’re worlds away in their communication. That’s just one of many scenarios Holden explores in this creative assortment of short stories, each taking place at Wicklow. Various residents grapple with their afflictions: Claudia McCormick is haunted by her late husband’s barrage of insults, which play in an endless loop in her head; the 10-year “warranty” on Alvin DeGrand’s coronary bypass surgery has just expired; Jacob Walterman, a talented artist, has had a stroke and can only draw half his subject’s face. Holden dodges the clichés a lesser writer might have employed when conjuring the rather obvious ailments that could befall a senior. Even when he addresses stroke, Alzheimer’s or emotional abuse, he adds a twist to avoid banality. He also tackles lesser-known maladies such as agnosia (the inability to recognize familiar objects, usually faces) and aphasia (the loss of speech). Holden’s characters are aware of their failings and often suffer privately, as caregivers placate them in babyish tones, oblivious to the patients’ quiet screams. Fortunately, humor throughout adds levity and helps avoids the melancholic note these stories could easily have adopted. Some stories offer more of a punch than others, while a few end too early, leaving readers wanting more. Nevertheless, each boasts a sharp, tight ending on a fleeting glimpse into the rooms of Wicklow.
New finesse on an old theme, sure to grab readers’ attention.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-615-90494-8
Page Count: 188
Publisher: Richard Holden
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
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
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