The prequel to Evans's mega bestseller, The Christmas Box, is longer than the earlier book, has its same cartoony thinness, is just as creaky at the joints—and reveals, if anything, a considerable rise in the tears-per-page ratio. We go back to Salt Lake City, this time to 1908, when David Parkin—thoughtful and sensitive person, millionaire head of Parkin Machinery Co., and collector of clocks—hires as his secretary one MaryAnne Chandler, the young woman (originally from England) destined to become David's wife, to live in his big mansion, and, in time, to become the benevolent, devout, mysteriously wise widow of The Christmas Box. How MaryAnne achieved such wisdom (quick answer: through suffering a lot) is the real subject of this book, and Evans out-Dickenses Dickens in his facile uses of melodrama in getting to his desired end. In Evans's world of tears and truth, people are by and large either all good or all bad, and if MaryAnne's perfections include being attractive, spunky, quick, principled, courageous, loving, and morally unwavering, the qualities of the base and degenerate villains who reduce her life to ashes are her perfect opposites not in some but all ways (``The men entered clumsily, growling in foul and guttural tones, drunk with whiskey and hatred''). In the beginning, there will be marriage, birth, and immeasurable happiness; and then, with purest villainy as its catalyst, there will be profound and equally immeasurable sorrow. But the healing spirit of human love and hope and goodness will not be destroyed entirely, living on in the muted but unquenchable goodness of MaryAnne's heart; in Evans's perfectly choreographed little flurry of symbols at the close; and even in the transformation of one of those pure villains into purely sensitive penitent. Certain handkerchief heaven for many, while others may experience the stirring of—well, let's just say other feelings. (First printing of 500,000; author tour)
Pub Date: April 24, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-81576-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1996
A presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
PERSPECTIVES
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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