Flawed but intriguing work from an estimable novelist who keeps extending her range and never fails to surprise and engage.
Past and present, reality and dreams, harsh truths and dangerous delusions mingle intriguingly in this unusual fourth novel from the versatile author of vivid historical and contemporary fiction (The Mammoth Cheese, 2003, etc.).
In a fragmented set of narratives that move back and forth between Virginia’s Appalachian Mountains at the tail end of the Depression and the present day, Holman explores the repercussions of a country boy’s relocation to New York City, and the grasp that his past retains, shaping both his own life and those of his chosen and estranged loved ones. When 12-year-old Eddie Alley is accidentally struck by a car and injured, he’s thrust into a relationship with visiting WPA writer Tucker Hayes and the latter’s wife (and companion photographer) Sonia. An encounter with Eddie’s mother Cora, a locally renowned semi-recluse rumored to be a witch, changes Tucker’s life forever. And the power of Cora (an Eternal Feminine figure depicted with impressive intensity) follows the others back north. Eddie, whom Tucker had introduced to the bizarre pleasures of classic horror films, finds the big city a welcoming environment and achieves success as a comic TV horror-movie host (“Captain Casket”), marries (Ann) and fathers a daughter (Wallis). But when a homeless teenaged boy (Jasper) enters Eddie’s home, and his confused affections, it seems Cora will not be forgotten. Eddie’s feelings toward and about his mother remain unresolved. And the witch woman’s lingering aura haunts the imaginations and experiences of emotionally unstable Wallis, the eventually abandoned Ann and the sexually baffled Eddie, who will be further burdened by a steadily growing cancer (which is, sadly, much more than a metaphor). Holman tells this eerie tale with considerable skill, but it’s flawed by too-numerous time shifts and the discrepancy between the vivid, flinty scenes set in 1940 and later scenes that appear pallid and strained by comparison.
Flawed but intriguing work from an estimable novelist who keeps extending her range and never fails to surprise and engage.Pub Date: March 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8021-1943-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
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
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
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