A multigenerational saga with all the trappings—plague, Indians, murder, fame, and love—but graced here with some subtlety and surprise by Shreve, whose seven earlier novels (A Country of Strangers, 1989, etc.) were fine and quirky enough to avoid easy genre tags. In 1890, Welsh-born beauty Anna Jermyn arrives on the shores of America. She's come for a job, as a servant, in a Washington, D.C., household. And though the action veers to other locations- -Wisconsin, New York, and Philadelphia—Washington remains the center of this family story just as Anna's daughter, Amanda, born on the first day of the new century, becomes its heart. From her earliest days, Amanda is destined to be different. Her best friend, Flat Mouth, is a Chippewa boy. Flat Mouth calls her ``A Man,'' and the name proves prophetic when, later, Amanda chops off her hair and assumes a masculine disguise in order to be sent overseas as a photographer in WW I. After the war, pregnant Amanda marries, settles restlessly in Washington, and continues to take photographs. Her daughter Sara, more conventional than mama, in turn gives birth to a wildly independent daughter, Eleanor, who grows up to have two daughters of her own, Lily and Kat. Through their stories we chart the course of the times from WW II through the McCarthy hearings, into the freewheeling, unsettling 60's and early 70's and, finally, on through the inward-looking 80's. In places, the bulk of all this material seems to overwhelm Shreve- -certain portents lead nowhere while real turning points are sometimes sketchy, almost outlines. But along the way, Shreve keeps a clear eye on the values and intelligence of her characters, and they carry it off—they're eminently likable if not entirely reliable. Rooted in formula, but blooming quixotically—something more than the garden-variety family saga.
Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1992
ISBN: 0-385-26796-7
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1991
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
