A sprawling novel of adultery and deception whose ideas don’t quite live up to their potential.
In Snyder-Carroll’s first novel, a married couple grapples with secrets and lies below the facade of their life in a picture-perfect Florida community.
Like Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), Hester Murphy spends much of her life confronting sexual mores, shame and deception. As the book opens, a hurricane is wreaking havoc on Pleasant Palms Trailer Park, where Hester and her husband, Al, have been living for years. While looking for her husband to make sure he is safe, Hester finds him in a compromising position—in bed with their adopted daughter, Nina, who appears to be gravely injured if not dead. From this gripping beginning, Snyder-Carroll jumps back and forth in time to present some of the sordid details of Hester’s life, her marriage to Al and the circumstances that brought Nina into their lives. As Hester tries to decide how to proceed with the choices before her, the anecdotes about her past demonstrate that “being married to Al Murphy was, since the first day she met him, all she ever wanted”—an obsession that leads her down a dangerous path. Snyder-Carroll creates a complex female heroine in Hester, who is, refreshingly, not always sympathetic; however, it is unclear how much of Hester’s perspective is meant to be unreliable. To the reader, Al’s flaws are so clearly delineated that Hester’s blindness appears almost dense rather than pitiable and rooted in complicated sexual obsession. The secondary characters can come across as a bit flat, including Nina, whom Hester suspects of being “a little actress who wants some attention.” The constant jumps in time are confusing, and the plot grows more and more soapy until it reaches its final Gothic twist, which is straight out of a Faulkner novel, without the stunning prose. Snyder-Carroll seems to be trying to weave in too many stories at once—a thriller plot of infidelity and murder, a satire of suburban social mores, even a moral and religious meditation on sexual impropriety. Focusing on one of these threads and narrowing her gaze might have helped shape some of the ideas into a more compact, readable novel.
A sprawling novel of adultery and deception whose ideas don’t quite live up to their potential.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2013
ISBN: 978-1484015667
Page Count: 340
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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