Prose throughout smelling of tallow and coal oil. Flynn (Living with Hyenas, 1995) deserves a prize.
Life on a Texas ranch, portrayed by Flynn with hard-earned western wit and matchless skill.
Back in 1910, Claris McCloud gets his ranch together but will soon need a son to help keep the place fit. “Claris considered going to Fort Worth and marrying a whore. They had a work ethic and when you married one you knew what you were getting.” Instead, he weds skittish virgin Celestine, 23, “scant and quiet as a whisper in a wind storm,” whom he must rape to get pregnant. She bears Clarista: all rawhide, fast to the saddle, born to herd and rope. When Claris dies, Rista takes over the ranch and finds herself courted by two men. She passes over rakish poet/newspaper editor Stoddard to marry feisty lawman Odis, who gives up his badge and becomes a fair ranch-hand. But daughter Cassie is too hotheaded to stick around the ranch after she gets pregnant; her mind tossing wildly with Hollywood dreams, Cassie takes off. Who fathered baby Chance? Well, even grown-up Chance wonders when he gets an anonymous call telling him that Grandmother Rista is dying and needs his help. Raised by Cassie to be a bow-tie gentleman, his whole childhood spent in front of the tube while Mom ran around, Chance is now a vastly smart, materialistic TV station manager in Florida who’s never ridden a horse in his life. He’s just buried Cassie when he has to go to the ranch and perhaps warehouse his grandmother in a nursing home. Rista has had her share of tragedy since her daughter took off; she shot Odin and later shot the man who may have fathered Cassie’s child. All grizzle and gristle, the old lady deals her grandson some life-lessons in blood and entrails unlike anything he’s seen on TV.
Prose throughout smelling of tallow and coal oil. Flynn (Living with Hyenas, 1995) deserves a prize.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-87565-244-1
Page Count: 356
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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