An overwrought excursion into the swamp of Southern race relations.
The death of a federal judge in 1968 leads the narrator of Wintner’s novel to contemplate and challenge race divisions in the South.
“Segregation is per se inequality,” wrote federal judge J. Waties Waring in a 1951 dissenting opinion in Briggs vs. Elliott—a statement that both helped pave the way for Brown vs. Board of Education and made Waring a much-maligned figure among the white elite in his hometown of Charleston, S.C. Wintner’s novel is an extended act of speculation about the reasons behind Waring’s transformation from segregationist to integrationist, told by a colleague, Arthur Covingdale, who undergoes his own transformation after Waring’s funeral. The story suggests that Waring’s public repudiation of segregation was actually an act of revenge against those who shunned him after his divorce from his first wife, Annie Gammell, a closeted lesbian; “Annie Gammell’s poor performance as a heterosexual wife may have been the original source of integration in the South,” Covingdale observes. Secrets abound—Covingdale, for example, burned a cross in front of Waring’s home—but Wintner (Toucan Whisper, Toucan Sing, 2002, etc.) approaches the plot points messily, drifting into dialect-heavy scenes and slow, wry depictions of Southern life. Eventually, Covingdale begins to fall for Aníse, the black cousin of Jim Cohen, one of Waring’s pallbearers, and their budding romance is meant to reveal the decades of prejudice that afflicted the Old South. But making sense of it requires the reader to navigate overheated, overwritten passages that, for all their finery, don’t make Covingdale and Aníse’s relationship convincing. Indeed, when Wintner descends into purple prose—Aníse’s sexual attentions are allegedly as “thorough as the drubbing Grant gave Lee at Appomattox”—the effect is quite the opposite.
An overwrought excursion into the swamp of Southern race relations.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-57962-123-6
Page Count: 268
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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BOOK REVIEW
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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
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