Nearly ten years after Thornley (Attempts to Join Society, 1986, etc.) won the George Orwell Memorial Prize for the film project of Coyote comes instead a period pieceboth ponderous and hallucinatoryfeaturing a nimble young British actor who journeys to 1830s America, ultimately to confront Death on the banks of the Mississippi. In London, John Gay is a promising Harlequin, but the freak death of a uniquely talented fellow acrobat in a cattle stampede unhinges him, sending him to seek his fortune in New York. He travels with acclaimed actor Edmond Parsloe, intending to stage with him a Harlequin version of Mother Goose, but after a rough sea journey complicated by a bizarre company of fellow travelers, the two arrive bruised and shaken. Unable to overcome a shipboard back injury, Edmond dies in a catapult collision with Gay onstage, and in a fog of suffering and guilt, Gay allows Rennah Wells, the slithering Yankee who crossed the ocean with them and who has an obsession for heads, to dig up Parsloe's. Drawn by stories of Indian dancers and shamans, Gay travels west, accompanied by the skull of his friend and also by Wells, but in a British fort outside Detroit, Wells is imprisoned while Gay and ``Edmond'' go free. Starving and feverish, Gay totters westward into the prairie until found by the medicine man Waboshiek, inhabitant of a former Indian village on the Mississippi whose people had been betrayed and slaughtered by US soldiers. Waboshiek relieves Gay of a peculiar mental disease stemming from his friend's death in the stampede, trying to use it to enhance his own power, but when Wells reappears hunting both their heads, a deadly showdown ensues. For all the marvels and fantasies detailed here: a sluggish, fever-laden vision of history in which effects outweigh substance and mood overshadows meaning.
Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1995
ISBN: 0-224-03891-5
Page Count: 226
Publisher: Jonathan Cape/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1995
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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