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MARIETTE IN ECSTASY

One of the enduring Christian mysteries is the existence of stigmatics (``people who bear in their bodies the injuries of Christ's crucifixion''). Hansen's third novel (astonishingly different from his Western historicals, Desperadoes, 1979, and The Assassination of Jesse James, 1987) is about a young stigmatic in an upstate New York priory in 1906. Mariette Baptiste is a 17-year-old postulant seeking to join the Sisters of the Crucifixion, a 200-year-old order with its motherhouse in Louvain, Belgium. The narrative covers the six months of Mariette's stay at the priory. She arrives in August, already ``the gossip of the summer'' because of her beauty and background. She is the daughter of the wealthy local doctor and the sister of the prioress, Mother Celine, 20 years her senior. The doctor, miserable at losing a second daughter in this way, feels Mariette is too ``high-strung'' for the convent; but for Father Marriott, the old priest who hears the sisters' confessions and becomes Mariette's most ardent champion, she is not neurotic but chaste. Hansen sets Mariette's preternatural experiences against the rhythms of priory life and the all-encompassing rhythms of the natural world. He is particularly good at dramatizing the central tension of priory life: the nuns' need for mutual affection, ruled impermissible because it distracts from their ``grandest passion,'' Jesus Christ. Mariette first feels Christ's wounds on Christmas Eve, as her sister is dying of cancer. Soon hundreds of lay people are coming to the priory, hoping to glimpse the stigmatic. The new prioress, initially skeptical, becomes convinced that Mariette's wounds are miraculous after the doctor has examined them; nonetheless, alarmed by the disruption of priory life, she sends Mariette home. Since the reader never doubts the authenticity of Mariette's experience, the only suspense element is the priory's response to it. But what Hansen has achieved, through his immaculate narration and (in the Joycean sense) his invisibility, is a notable act of witness.

Pub Date: Oct. 23, 1991

ISBN: 0-06-018214-8

Page Count: 192

Publisher: HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1991

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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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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

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

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

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