A powerful tale of one man’s contentious, lifelong relationship with his faith.
A debut novel about leaving the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
At the beginning of Rhodes’ thoughtful, engrossing novel, 60-something Bernie’s friends screen a movie for him. The unnamed film (apparently patterned on the real-life 2003 feature Latter Days) depicts two attractive young men—one Mormon, one not—who struggle against the Mormon church’s strictures against homosexuality. Bernie’s friends know of his long history with Mormonism, and they expect the movie to provoke strong reactions. But they’re caught off guard by just how strong those reactions are, as the film dredges up violent, long-repressed memories. The bulk of the novel consists of Bernie’s protracted reminiscences of his long, complicated and sometimes-dark dealings with his former church; the book’s title is a bitter allusion to the reported practice of using electroshock “therapy” on gay communicants. Bernie agonizes all over again about how he discovered his own nature, thinking at one point that “any rapt God listening to my heart would have seen past my words into my deepest wish—to find another boy just like me.” In the course of his recollections, readers meet such a boy—Bernie’s great love, Fin—and their relationship forms the heart of the book: “My life had been beautiful with him,” Bernie recalls. Through Bernie’s personal story, Rhodes gives readers a panoramic, quite affecting look at the experience of growing up a gay Mormon (“Queer,” Bernie reflects at one point. “It just hung menacingly in the air now. It didn’t mean weirdo anymore”). It also includes Bernie’s “exit stories,” detailing the often fraught psychological process of leaving the faith. The narrative veers frequently into a low-key bitterness against Mormonism that will certainly win it no converts, but as an X-ray look inside the modern church, this book could scarcely be bettered.
A powerful tale of one man’s contentious, lifelong relationship with his faith.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-1495356018
Page Count: 516
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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