With a labyrinthine, but coherent structure, this tale about an enigmatic widower turns out to be as sincere as it is dark.
A debut drama follows an elderly man re-examining his life and beliefs as he awaits the imminent End of Days in 2012.
Somerset Garden returns to his home in Drums, Pennsylvania, shortly after the death of his wife, Nona. The couple had been living in Baltimore for more than 25 years, having abandoned Drums after their son, Cole, vanished on his 18th birthday. Somerset’s planning to renovate the old house but he’s also looking forward to the prophesied Armageddon on Dec. 21, the same day he turns 80. A former believer, he now blames a “heartless and imperfect God” for Cole’s disappearance and for a world wrought with famine, tsunamis, and other such calamities. He dives headfirst into his memories, recalling his angry, withdrawn son, who may have tried burning down a church. Even further back is the protagonist’s sadistic, hateful father, Blake, who recites Scripture while tormenting or beating Somerset and his older brother, Wally, with the latter often reveling in the parent’s savagery. Somerset’s life is filled with regret, including an inability to save his mother, Pearl, from the brutality she invariably endured. This may, however, be insights into a man’s fractured mind. He enters into frequent mental discourses with Nona and Cole, and converses with a porcelain-faced boy who, Somerset confesses, may or may not actually be in his house. The bleak, stream-of-consciousness narrative will likely have some readers questioning the legitimacy of Somerset’s recollections. The protagonist, for one, is inconsistent: unsure of his birth year but later settling on 1933, and contrarily asserting that God’s dead, absent, or a complete fabrication. Notwithstanding, Somerset is coming to terms with his past, including a fear that he’s capable of the same cruelty as his father. He isn’t reminiscing in sorrow, but audaciously confronting his failures—later scenes are both more revealing and more violent— and welcoming his potential end with open arms. Kalsi’s nonlinear approach is intelligible, with random voices in Somerset’s head easy to decipher: he’s Dutch to Nona and Pops to Cole. The author’s prose, too, is melodic, even at its strangest, like equating “misshapen country lemons” to baby squid.
With a labyrinthine, but coherent structure, this tale about an enigmatic widower turns out to be as sincere as it is dark.Pub Date: April 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9907790-6-3
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Little Feather Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2016
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 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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