Earnest but deeply flawed, and saccharine when it’s not overstuffed.
March (Catbird, 2006, etc.) shows a Southern teenager getting a few lessons in tolerance after he’s caught vandalizing a synagogue.
Jesse Terrill has a few good reasons to be mad. His mother skipped out of Pottstown years before, his brother in the Marines was killed in a terrorist attack and his father has been living in a mental hospital ever since a violent assault. Though he has a stable home life with his uncle G.T., Jesse’s default mode is anger and confusion. And he’s got company: three buddies who join him late at night—“one of those nights when you want to tear something up”—to drink wine and smoke dope, then break into the B’nai Shalom Synagogue and wreck the place. Jesse is caught and, after withstanding the congregation’s withering glares in court, is put on probation and assigned to perform community service at a retirement home. His chief job is to mind Mendel Ebban, a Holocaust survivor who was forced to prepare bodies for burning in the ovens at Treblinka. Unsurprisingly, much learning ensues. Mendel finally has somebody to get him out of his room, and Jesse gets to pick up some knowledge about shofars, the Warsaw ghetto and Passover. His Talmudic education occurs at the same time that he runs afoul of a former biker-gang leader and gets a lead on the identity of the man who assaulted his father. March’s efforts to craft a commentary about vengeance and forgiveness are consistently strained. Mendel is too bogged down by back story and pedagogy to be a full-blooded character, cookie-cutter thugs and cops shadow Jesse at every turn and a contrived romantic subplot adds little. Worst of all, the author never seems to have a solid grip on Jesse, whose attitudes and reactions shift mainly to serve the plot: One moment he’s referring to a yarmulke as a “goofy hat,” a few pages later he’s musing thoughtfully on the Book of Ruth.
Earnest but deeply flawed, and saccharine when it’s not overstuffed.Pub Date: May 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-57962-185-8
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2009
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 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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