James’s relentless work habits produced a frequently stunning oeuvre. His biographer’s focus on the novelist’s daily rounds...
This sequel to Henry James: The Young Master (1996, etc.) chronicles, in numbingly Jamesian detail, the expatriate writer’s attempt, in his social life and his work, to create a venue for “large & confident action—splendid & supreme creation.”
Novick (Law and History/Vermont Law School) follows the novelist from 1881, after The Portrait of a Lady was published, to his death in 1916, when he was hailed as a modernist master who introduced into fiction the notion of the observer’s consciousness. While covering relations with family members such as older brother William, the philosopher, Novick justifiably spends more time on James’s cosmopolitan circle of artists and their aristocratic mentors, who crossed national and sexual boundaries. This group heightened his tendency toward painting tableaux rather than telling tales, while leaving him out of step with both middle-aged women, who formed the major readership of literary fiction, and London theatergoers, who rejected him in his mid-career attempt to write successful dramas. James could not have asked for a more sympathetic biographer. Novick is tolerant of his homosexuality, sensitive to his battles with contemporary tastes and absolutely admiring of his achievements. If anything, the author is too sympathetic to his subject. His explanation of James’s prejudices, for instance, nearly becomes exculpatory: “There is not a great deal of difference, in the end, between his view of roles as realities that must be accepted, and the very modern view that while real, they are socially constructed.” Nor is he above the occasional gaffe—if James met Evelyn Waugh, as claimed, the latter could not have been a “young writer” yet, as he had only been born a few years before this encounter. Novick is on surer ground in explaining the stylistically dense, psychologically rich fiction James created in his last, major phase: The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl.
James’s relentless work habits produced a frequently stunning oeuvre. His biographer’s focus on the novelist’s daily rounds in an otherwise quiet life is just as relentless and demanding, but far less artful.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-679-45023-8
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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