Sincere and captivating, a revelatory look at the freeing properties of forgiveness and acceptance.
An art historian tries to make sense of her family’s secrets while caring for an ailing parent in Turner’s debut novella set in the late 1990s.
Katie has one goal in mind when she returns home to upstate New York: secure care—in-home or otherwise—for her 82-year-old father. In the two years since his wife died, retired attorney Edward Broadbent has been “shrinking” away, rapidly losing weight and his vision as he battles a congestive heart condition and macular degeneration. Katie initially plans a quick visit, but nagging issues from the past and a desire to finally connect lead to an extended stay. There “are some things I need to know before my father dies,” Katie tells her husband, Henry, who remains in Los Angeles with their two children. Over the course of her visit, she attempts to coax more information from her father about his Iowa upbringing (“I look at Dad, thinking for the umpteenth time how little I know of his boyhood. Born in Fort Dodge, a small city I’ve never been to”). And she tries to discuss her mother’s debilitating mental illness—a topic seldom examined, or even acknowledged, in their previous talks. As the roles of parent and child begin to blur, Katie must answer some tough questions while struggling to determine what her father really needs in his final years. Using events from the family’s past and present, Turner explores the complexity of familial bonds in this highly relatable work of literary fiction. Early in this satisfying book, she notes: “Someone, Proust I think, said that we only truly see someone we love after an absence, and then only if we see them first before they see us.” Turner’s protagonist experiences similar clarity. When Edward greets his daughter at the airport, the once-powerful lawyer uses a cane and wears a smile of “frozen amicability”—a conversational countermeasure he’s adopted now that his poor eyesight prevents him from reading facial cues. The shift in power frightens Katie and removes both characters from their established roles. Yet as both gain footing in this new reality, there are also moments of unexpected joy.
Sincere and captivating, a revelatory look at the freeing properties of forgiveness and acceptance.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-692-52010-9
Page Count: 138
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
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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