Brooding, lyrical, and thoughtful, though the narrative, like Stephen himself, seems slightly distanced from the events it...
The author of The Undiscovered Country (1998) delicately portrays an alienated scion of America’s wealthiest family searching for spiritual solace in the earth’s wildest places.
Gillison, who lived for two years in New Guinea as a child, loosely bases her story on the life of Michael Rockefeller, who disappeared there in 1961. Her protagonist is Stephen Hesse, son of a working-class Englishwoman whom megarich Nicholas Hesse married while he was a student at Cambridge and divorced before their son turned two. Stephen grows up encased in his mother’s angry, obsessive love, yearning for closer contact with his father, who is proud of his eldest child’s academic brilliance but a bit aloof now that Nicholas is more suitably remarried. First a classics teacher at prep school and then an anthropology professor at Harvard show Stephen how an intellectual discipline might assuage some of his emotional needs. He falls in love with an older woman, “the only person in the world who could stop this aching in his chest,” but she sends him away not long after Stephen persuades his father to fund an expedition to New Guinea and use Hesse influence to get him invited, even though he’s less qualified than the other students. “I have found a place where I am completely at ease,” he writes in his notebook. But even among headhunters in the tropics, Stephen never truly shakes off the power and privilege he was born to, as he buys up native artifacts (including the skull of a young man he knew) and browbeats a Dutch diplomat and two guides into taking him out on a boat trip during monsoon season. Yet intelligent, needy Stephen is a sympathetic character, viewed with compassion by the author. Whatever faults he has, he pays for them with his life in an affecting climax that hints death might be what Stephen Hesse has sought all along.
Brooding, lyrical, and thoughtful, though the narrative, like Stephen himself, seems slightly distanced from the events it describes so eloquently.Pub Date: March 9, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-50819-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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