Hunters and fishermen who don’t mind the sloppy plot and undeveloped cast will enjoy the precision and passion that Jones...
Two men take the same canoe trip twice, once after graduating from high school, then 50 years later as their lives are winding down.
In early fall of 1950, before Ben, who narrates Part One, leaves for Korea with the Marines and Harry enters college, the boys canoe down the Firesteel River in Wisconsin to Lake Superior, the Gitche Gumee of the title. Along the way they meet a bear, a giant trout, two aging but vicious outlaws, a wealthy hunter whose fish they poach and whose daughter Cora and her friend Wanda they also poach, some grass-smoking “bohemians” conveniently named Jack and Dean, and a dog that Harry ends up adopting. The adventures, while sometimes bloodthirsty, remain lighthearted, the boys’ chance for survival never in doubt. A short third-person account of Ben’s horrific experience in Korea follows. Saying little new about war-as-hell and shedding no light on Ben’s emotionally scarred character that is not clear from the rest of the story, it is mostly an excuse for some darker macho scenes. In Part Two, told by Harry, now a retired doctor dying of prostate cancer, the two men take the same river trip and find skewed parallels of their earlier adventures. They encounter a giant salamander that’s destroying the trout population, then are reunited with Wanda and Cora, who now run a hunting lodge. The salamander turns out to be part of an evil plot instigated by a former anti–Vietnam activist/vegetarian computer-mogul who hates hunting and therefore wants to put Cora out of business. Things turn increasingly preposterous until Ben and Harry face a Thelma and Louise decision.
Hunters and fishermen who don’t mind the sloppy plot and undeveloped cast will enjoy the precision and passion that Jones (Deadville, 1998, etc.) puts into what really matters: hooking a fish, guns, and the art of packing supplies.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-58574-406-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2001
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
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
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