Intelligent, subtle, minimalist stories by a promising young writer.
A short story collection that explores its characters’ sensibilities with delicacy and precision.
Of these 12 stories, seven have been previously published, and two received Pushcart Prize nominations. Taylor (Everything to Do with You, 2010) sets his tales mostly in San Francisco, often among 20-somethings struggling to make it as they navigate relationships, work, and life’s alarums and excursions. The opening story, “Flight and Weightless,” is particularly successful: two young people were once a couple, but Maria stayed in Spokane, Washington, when the narrator returned to San Francisco. Now she’s dying of cancer, and he’s helping her fulfill a last wish—to push a grand piano onto a frozen lake so she can play it: “Thick spots [on the ice] sound like a chandelier reuniting with the ground.” In that sentence, everything depends on the unexpected but perfect “reuniting”—the chandelier’s fall (or the piano’s, or Maria’s) isn’t a disaster but a reunion. Taylor often achieves his lapidary style through similarly unexpected but fitting conjunctions; in the same story, the narrator wonders, “Who coined winter wonderland? Were they not aware of hypothermia and giving up, and goddamn Spokane?” The “and” phrases, as they move from the general to the particular (from cold weather to one couple’s breakup), nicely mirror how people personalize disaster. Some quirks, such as Taylor’s frequent interest in fingers and toes, add a surreal touch to these stories. The author seems aware of the danger that such a style can devolve into preciousness or portentousness, and in “Depluralize the Pair” he both enacts and criticizes this dynamic. His narrator proclaims, for example, that relationships “always progress or end in ceremonies. Divorce or marriage.” Or death, perhaps, or just tapering off? But if readers become irritated at this 20-something know-it-all narrator, the story subverts the situation by granting him some self-recognition as he gets older, with his knees creaking as he unloads the dryer: “We wanted everything to be art….We finally had to deal with something hard, that wasn’t artsy or youthful or innocent.”
Intelligent, subtle, minimalist stories by a promising young writer.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2014
ISBN: 978-0578152981
Page Count: 178
Publisher: Seventh Tangent
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
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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