Each chapter renders a story complete, and the stories together weave a deeply mined narrative of place and people, elegiac...
Minnesota author Stonich (The Ice Chorus, 2005, etc.) draws a novel from 15 linked north-country stories.
Naledi Lodge on Little Hatchet Lake is a now-faded Minnesota summer resort, a place of "water in all its incarnations—stream, swamp, puddle, or lake." Czech immigrant Vaclav Machutova ran the resort in its heyday. His orphaned granddaughter, Meg, spent summers there and winters in Chicago boarding schools. Stonich’s lake-connected stories move through time from Meg’s childhood onward, each story/chapter linked to Naledi Lodge like spokes to a hub. The book opens with adult Meg, a prominent artist, sketching a portfolio of a severed human hand brought home by her treasured wolflike dog. Then an advertising executive remembers a dalliance, a Lolita-like seduction. Adult sisters confront a euthanasia pact made after their mother’s lingering death. A Balkan refugee, unable to penetrate the insular Scandinavian community, reconciles his isolation on the lake’s quiet waters. Meg’s citified gay cousin delivers Meg’s mother’s ashes and discovers a connection to family and place. One of the more affecting reoccurring characters is Ursa Olson, Vac’s contemporary sometime-lover and a woman who prefers the hardy simplicity imposed by the inhospitable land. Ursa, defiant and self-reliant as her children plot to shift her from her cabin, finds comfort in one of Vac’s lost journals. Readers also encounter a giant bull moose, deer silently drifting in a glade and empathetic characters—all rendered with compassionate insight and a gift for artful observation—including Polly, surrogate grandmother and science professor turned novelist; Alpo, trimming away at grief in topiary; one-dimensional Magda, who left Vac for a Third Reich functionary; Meg’s father, Tomas, plunging to his death with his pregnant wife as an airplane crashes, "We will die, yes, but it’ll be all right."
Each chapter renders a story complete, and the stories together weave a deeply mined narrative of place and people, elegiac yet life-affirming.Pub Date: April 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-816687664
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Univ. of Minnesota
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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