A humanistic project that delivers a good read, with plot twists and memorable characters.
Increasingly preoccupied by fears of dementia, an elderly man in a nursing home finds a new purpose and love in this novel.
Still in his 60s, Robert Glickman, a retired neurologist, resides at the Youth Fountain Senior Living Facility, called the Fountain of Youth by some. The decision was made for him, he says, but he’s also haunted by fears of Lewy body dementia, a “devastating and ugly” disease that runs in his family. As Glickman says repeatedly, “I have other plans when the time comes,” designs that have something to do with the locked box he stores in his closet and the key he wears around his neck. In the meantime, he keeps himself sharp by testing his brain every Sunday with 20 questions from his grandson’s sixth-grade quiz book (“Question 1: Earth is located in which galaxy?”), fretting when he gets any wrong and hiding the volume weekly to test whether he can find it again. Glickman gets along fairly well with the staff (especially the siblings Rufus, Ruth, and Hester, who share a tragic history that has left Hester with progressive mutism) and the other residents, all but two of whom are Jewish. One, O’Reilly, pretends to be Jewish by cursing in Yiddish and telling the ladies he’s circumcised. A persistent rumor has it that the other gentile, Boyle, is a Nazi in hiding; he has a greasy-looking teenage grandson, Stanley, who gets caught between the FBI and a drug cartel. Without intending to, Glickman finds himself becoming deeply involved with the life of the Fountain, even experiencing romance again with Christina Abernathy, a new resident and a retired psychotherapist who might be able to help Hester. Not paradoxically for Glickman, these relationships and the work he does on their behalf give him the strength to continue fighting for the right to die with dignity. Although this novel wears its heart on its sleeve, being dedicated to all those working for Glickman’s cause, Shear (The Trials of Adrian Wheeler, 2014) never allows the book to become didactic. Instead, his remarkable characters demonstrate the fullness with which life can be lived when you’re willing to get involved, as Glickman does not only with Fountain residents, but also with a vulnerable young woman named Lucy Diamond he runs across. (Early on, he notices that Lucy’s “sales ticket from Goodwill still dangled from her tattered jacket.”) In an entertaining episode, Glickman gets roped into reading The Great Gatsby aloud on Lower Level 2, the nursing floor, which he’s always avoided out of fear and disgust (the smells, the dying). Fitzgerald’s novel sparks a lot of interesting discussions among residents Glickman had tagged as moribund. At the end, most listeners clap, but not the sentimental ones, “disappointed that Gatsby could not hold onto the rays of green emanating across the sound.” Rays of green, like the youth they can’t hold onto at the Fountain? While never in denial about hard truths, and always claiming the right to make end-of-life decisions for oneself, this engrossing book also demonstrates the reality of hope.
A humanistic project that delivers a good read, with plot twists and memorable characters.Pub Date: May 19, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5092-1389-4
Page Count: 298
Publisher: The Wild Rose Press, Inc.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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