A deeply affecting and fearlessly descriptive story that charts the complexities of life with a potentially fatal illness.
A cancer patient searches for direction and fulfillment in Jones’ (A Rising Tide of People Swept Away, 2016, etc.) novel.
In 2008, following a breast cancer diagnosis, Rebecca “Bec” Robertson undergoes a double mastectomy and begins aggressive chemotherapy. Her husband, William, is a chaplain in the U.S. Army serving in Afghanistan. Near the start of the novel, William boards a plane from Dallas to begin a journey back to Kabul, leaving his sick wife behind. As they part, there’s the sense that an emotional chasm is opening between them. Ever since Bec became ill, William has taken to treating her with excessive caution, and she senses his relief as they bid farewell to each other. Bec, meanwhile, feels a growing sense of detachment from him and a nagging suspicion that her recovery may be “Easier alone.” Furthermore, the couple is in dire financial straits; Bec chooses not to burden William with the knowledge that their money has “bled away” and that the bank is foreclosing on their house. Soon, she relocates to a cabin in New Mexico. There, she meets an oddball set of locals—the first of whom, Marcus, she finds sitting in her truck, expecting her to drive him somewhere. The narrative also looks back over Bec’s grueling childhood, her courtship with William when they were both teenagers, and her stoic efforts to carve out a life for herself after cancer—part of which may involve a relationship with an unpredictable former Marine named Michael. Some readers may be unnerved by Jones’ unflinching descriptions of the physical realities of cancer treatment: “Tribal marks, two slices of purple thread ruled out in straight horizontal lines below her chest….At least they had left the muscles underneath, so she didn’t have craters.” These graphic revelations of the treatments’ brutal violence can be difficult to read; in Bec’s case, surgeons are said to have “Cut away hunks of her body to fend off death.” Along the way, Jones vividly captures the character’s sense of emotional torment: “Sometimes she wanted something to blame, someone to scream at.” In her struggle for survival, Bec lives on a razor’s edge, and Jones subtly charts her progress and psychological shifts—which, the author points out, are also affected by medication: “At first, the steroids drove her crazy and the anticoagulants left her so vulnerable she feared to touch anything. When her desire for intimacy returned, she couldn’t find William.” As the story progresses, readers will be drawn ever closer to Bec—they’ll gain a profound understanding of the challenges she faces and be awed by her spirit of survival. But there are also feelings of joy in this harrowing novel, as Bec’s newfound conception of self arises from her sense of loss and despair. Overall, this novel offers a nuanced and thoroughly believable portrait of a cancer patient’s everyday life that offers hope and sadness in equal measure.
A deeply affecting and fearlessly descriptive story that charts the complexities of life with a potentially fatal illness.Pub Date: March 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-944388-61-4
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Fomite
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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