With six unconventionally religious novels to date, this brave, meditative author has carved a unique niche in American...
Merullo (Vatican Waltz, 2013, etc.) offers a third installment in the spiritual adventures of Otto Ringling.
Otto is in a slightly better place than he was after his cherished wife, Jeannie, died (Lunch With Buddha, 2012), but he’s still resisting the assurances of his brother-in-law, noted Buddhist guru Volya Rinpoche, that suffering is merely a stage in his spiritual journey. Nor, visiting the North Dakota retreat center run by Rinpoche and Otto’s sister, Seese, does he want to hear about Seese’s dream vision proclaiming that Otto and his brother-in-law must travel “to the mountains” to facilitate the meeting of his 7-year-old niece, Shelsa—who her parents believe is “a great spiritual being who’d been born…to save the world from cataclysm”—with another great spirit who will help her change the world. Merullo doesn’t make it easy for skeptical readers with this setup, but that’s the point: on their road trip south, through some of America’s most spectacular national parks as well as several grim Indian reservations and New-Age hotspots like Boulder, we, like Otto, find our cynicism worn away by Rinpoche’s gentle instruction in the simple but terribly difficult art of letting go, living each moment to the fullest, seeing the sacred in the everyday. Merullo never forgets how at odds this wisdom is with frenetic, plugged-in contemporary life, which makes all the more moving those times when Otto is able to surrender to it and see the world “as if the disguise had been yanked away.” Sharp character sketches of people encountered on the way and occasional references to current events (it’s August 2013) keep the narrative from floating away in spiritual self-absorption. It closes in Las Vegas (Rinpoche’s love of gambling is a running joke), where Otto takes one more step along the path of accepting a new way of being and looking at the world. Clearly there’s more to come.
With six unconventionally religious novels to date, this brave, meditative author has carved a unique niche in American literature.Pub Date: June 2, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-56512-928-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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