Moss (Fire Along the Sky, 1992, etc.) combines American history with Mohawk culture for a sometimes forced, slow-moving account of life on the Hudson River during the French and Indian Wars. The elaborate fates of a young Irishman, an aging Mohawk woman, a lovely but impoverished Rhinelander, and a black slave converge in this florid tale of the frontier. Island Woman, a shaman who dreams of events that'll shape the course of history, introduces us to the matriarchal society of the Mohawk people. The sensual beauty of her dreams is juxtaposed with the primitive violence of the war-torn Mohawk Valley. Meanwhile, Catherine (``Cat'') Wissenberg dreams of escaping to the New World—a dream eventually realized but not without enormous cost. Both Cat and her mother arrive on America's shores only after murdering Cat's father, a man who repeatedly abused them both. Their escape is accomplished through an affair Cat has with Billy Johnson, a young student who's committed a murder of his own—on Cat's account no less. Billy, too, is haunted by dreams he attempts to ignore; but, while not exactly willing to foresee his fate, he does fulfill it by also beginning life in the New World. By the time he arrives, Cat has already been captured by natives, introduced to Island Woman, and rescued by a freed slave, a seer himself, who later shows white men how to cope with a small-pox epidemic. Billy Johnson is, of course, Sir William Johnson, a real-life settler who maintained friendly relations with the Indians, allowing the British colonies to survive attacks by the French. Here, however, historical events are represented as having been guided and shaped by visions and dreams. Says Johnson about the validity of such a soulful take: ``I suppose it all depends on what one is open to seeing.'' An action-packed tribute to the roles that women, and Native American spiritual traditions, have played in American history.
Pub Date: July 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-85738-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 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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