Rock-ribbed Montana love story. Wolfe’s second novel (after the passionate 1995 fable, The Woman Who Lives in the Earth) downplays the more fantastic elements of that earlier tale in favor of muscle-to-bone storytelling. Here, sleek real-estate-demographics analyst Liz Hanson, after 23 years away, returns to Montana to visit her aged grandmother, whose cluttered, chaotic house fronts a lake once used for logging. Once there, Liz discovers a painting on Masonite of a flying woman named Rose, and the story then leaps back to 1948, when Rose Red Crows, a white woman raised by Indians, returns from work in a California aircraft factory to waitress in the tiny town’s only diner. Soon after, in drifts Cody Hayes, a saw-sharpener and gifted machinist. At first, he plans to work in town only long enough to pay for the repairs his old truck needs. But then he meets Rose. Love blooms, but it’s a dangerous love. Dominating the town is the lake, a deep, mysterious body of water that Rose sees as having supernatural qualities, as something able to bestow life or ecstasy on those who believe. After building a sea wall for an ambitious local, Cody works out a method for dredging sunken logs lying on the clear lake’s bottom, with the intention of selling them to a distant mill. Meantime, the diner’s regulars, many of them lusting after Rose themselves, take a fierce dislike to Cody, and when two kids bust open a gas pump and set part of the town and the lake afire with 5,000 gallons of gasoline, he’s framed for the disaster. As a result, Cody’s actually committed to a nearby electroshock-happy asylum for observation—while Rose pines and sets about his rescue. The story soars off into an astonishing climax, nicely mingling the mundane and marvelous and once again demonstrating Wolfe’s stirring, original power as a storyteller.
Pub Date: June 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-06-017412-9
Page Count: 342
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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