Readers who enjoy a slower-paced novel will find this character-driven tale interesting and thought-provoking.
The past and present join together in a tale of a summer love that weaves its tendrils around three young hearts and still grows there decades later.
It’s the summer before 16-year-old Pip goes to university, and his father has hired two girls to spend July and August at their home on Sark—a British Channel island off the coast of Normandy. Twenty-one-year-old Jude arrives to tutor Pip; Sofi, 19, becomes the family’s cook. Pip’s ailing mother seldom ventures downstairs, so when Pip’s father is away on business, the three free themselves from responsibilities and explore the island and grow close. Summer drifts by and ends in a confused tangle—“a hot, melted knot”—the day before Jude flies home. Thus ends the first 29 chapters, originally written as a novella for which Rankin-Gee received the Shakespeare and Co. prize (2011); they reveal her ability to create vital characters and paint wonderfully with words. The three young people are well-drawn, and the dialogue is fresh and vibrant, but the story lacks a strong plot; it's a cerebral tale made up of Jude’s thoughts and sharp observations but one that lacks forward momentum. Later, Rankin-Gee added additional chapters, giving readers a peek into the subsequent lives of Jude, Sofi and Pip, each still affected by their long-ago summer on Sark. Alternating chapters narrated by each of the three characters serve to address the unasked question at the end of the first half of the novel: “So who loved whom, exactly?” But there's an odd sense of disjointedness: Answers are hinted at, alluded to, leaving the reader to make leaps; and though the final chapters provide some closure, they raise as many questions as they answer…which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Readers who enjoy a slower-paced novel will find this character-driven tale interesting and thought-provoking.Pub Date: July 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-04535-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
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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