Oklahoma City trial lawyer Mitchell builds on a 1973 uprising at a Sooner state prison in his flawed but bleakly effective first novel. Carriage-trade attorney Eric Williams welcomes his appointment to the pardon and parole board of an unnamed Plains state not only as a form of professional recognition but also as a distraction from painful divorce proceedings. As the vaguely liberal young advocate prepares for his initial hearing at McHenry Penitentiary, the overcrowded institution's inmates are laying careful plans for a breakout. In the meantime, with an election looming, Governor David Horton and his prospective challengers maneuver for political advantage on the issue of prison reform's high cost. In his official capacity, Eric encounters a host of crafty convicts, more than a few of whom convince him that they're ready to return to the outside world. Warning that most candidates for release will never adjust to civilized society, however, the board's older hands temper the new boy's penchant for clemency. The cynics are proved right when an inner circle of cons ignites a deadly and destructive riot to provide cover for an escape. In the confusion, Eric and fellow civilians are taken hostage. As television cameras focus on the hellish disturbances in the besieged prison's yard, he's led outside the walls through a long-forgotten tunnel behind the subterranean chamber that houses McHenry's electric chair. Eventually, Eric winds up in chains in a backwoods cabin with a band of homicidal fugitives who mean him no good. Then, freed by an unsentimental lawman who understands the criminal mind, the ex- idealist quits his post and lights out for Colorado's mountains to come to terms with the traumatic experience. While Mitchell delivers a full measure of gritty detail on life behind bars, he stumbles with a surfeit of set-piece preachments (on redemption, recidivism, rehabilitation, etc.) and finally veers off course into didactic melodrama at the close.
Pub Date: April 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-8061-2917-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Univ. of Oklahoma
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1997
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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