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THE GETTIN PLACE

An ambitious and engrossing portrayal of a black family under siege in white America, by the accomplished young author of the short-story sequence Aquaboogie (1990) and the novel I Been in Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots (1992). The story is set, as are Straight's earlier books, in a racially divided California city: This time, it's (fictional) Rio Seco, where hardworking Hosea Thompson's relative security (he owns an auto salvage and repair business) is threatened when a burning car with two dead white women in it is found on his property and Hosea, protesting police accusations, is shot and wounded, then jailed. The story branches out quickly, and in several fruitful directions. Straight explores the reactions of Hosea's aggrieved and mystified family; his memories of the (historical) race riots of some 60 years earlier in Tulsa, Oklahoma, when his family was terrorized and his father killed; the enlistment of his youngest son Marcus (a high-school history teacher, whom his rough-edged older siblings nickname ``Sissyfly'') to help prove Hosea's innocence; and Marcus's own complicated memories of growing up knowing he wanted a different life, struggling to keep his distance from his family without succumbing to condescension. Straight stumbles only when detailing Marcus's attempts to jog his sullen students' consciences during Black History month; here, and only here, the novel briefly shrinks to the dimensions of a sociology lesson. Otherwise, its power to involve us in the lives of a sprawling clan whose members are all vividly differentiated remains undiminished over more than 400 pages. Nor should it be forgotten that Straight has contrived a fascinating mystery, whose credible and satisfying solution contains a stunning climactic irony. Both dramatic and melodramatic in the best possible senses: another impassioned and powerful performance by one of the best writers to have emerged in this decade. (Author tour)

Pub Date: June 27, 1996

ISBN: 0-7868-6086-3

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Hyperion

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1996

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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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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

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

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

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