A mostly comic, if uneven, first novel about a girl in a 1950's Georgia textile mill town who nourishes herself with fantasies of Elvis and of her long-gone father—while her mother would rather she feed on Bible verses and anything dripping in fatback. LaVonne Grubbs works hard as a doffer in the mill's spinning room, saving up to move into her own apartment so she can get away from Momma, an embittered woman seemingly bent on keeping LaVonne, now a year out of high school, from having any fun. But just as LaVonne is aiming to light out, as daddy did, her mother has a heart attack and she's stopped. So LaVonne distracts herself from her dull life by singing in the Sunshine Choir, organizing ``The Real Elvis Fan Club,'' and daydreaming about her two heroes—her father and Elvis. Meanwhile, the plot pivots on a doffing contest (hard to visualize) wherein LaVonne's co-worker Grady Fay is the main contender—for the contest and her heart. His chances are diminished, however, by the jealousy of LaVonne's erstwhile boyfriend Gene, a malevolent character whose capacity for violence becomes fully realized later on when he lures LaVonne to Memphis for the funeral of Gladys Presley. (While the reader is not unprepared for the rape scene that ensues in a motel room there, the shift in tone is problematic.) Despite the rape, LaVonne attends the mourning of Gladys Presley—and then spots Elvis, who looks right through her. Later, back home, she'll also see her father—at her mother's funeral—but he, too, will disappoint. The author better manages the complexity of black humor at that funeral, with the tale ending on a resounding, deservedly high note. The comic strength of Mee's debut can sometimes sabotage both plot and character, but the language is dead-on, and the humor genuine. A promising debut.
Pub Date: May 15, 1993
ISBN: 1-56145-080-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Peachtree
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1993
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
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