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
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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