Yarbrough fulfills the novelist's chief task, by giving weight and import to human actions.
Yarbrough returns to Loring, Miss.
Loring, circa 1902, was the setting for the author’s Visible Spirits (2001); and 1943 for his Prisoners of War (2004). Now he chronicles the present-day residents of Loring, most notably Pete Barrington, former high-school football hero and a physician, who has returned with his wife and family to the town of his youth after sexual misconduct with a patient ended his California practice. Pete's physique and magnetism amount to a troubled destiny. As a teenager, he was seduced by Maggie Depoyster, the mother of a shy, devout schoolmate. As an adult, Pete ruefully reflects that “he felt as if . . . some force, like gravity, drew others toward him. Once they entered his orbit, their navigational systems went haywire.” Now, Maggie's son Alan, a deacon at his church and manager of a grocery store, still blames Pete for destroying his family, a resentment fed by Pete's popularity and superiority in sports. This grudge has lasting, tragic consequences for both families, particularly because Alan's son Mason, a kindly boy, is the first to approach Pete's daughter Toni at her new school, and the two have become friends. The dialogue here sometimes reflects the novelist's voice too obviously. It's hard to imagine anyone saying, as Pete does, “The rarity of the circus combined with the smallness of the town to make its presence here a thing of wonder.” But if a few phrases are overly purple, much rings true, particularly the lifelike, easy, but inexorable way events unfold. The momentum that builds, the increasing power the characters have to do each other good or ill, holds the reader spellbound. In the character of Alan, there is a particularly moving portrait of a person of faith, which makes the one shocking crime he commits all the more resonant.
Yarbrough fulfills the novelist's chief task, by giving weight and import to human actions.Pub Date: June 9, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-4438-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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