A fascinating and wonderfully evocative first novel about life on Alcatraz—seen through the eyes of a little girl growing up on the Rock in the 1950s. Though not widely known, it was not only America's most wanted who called Alcatraz home: The prison guards and their families also resided on the island, living in quaint cottages, the children taking the San Francisco ferry to school, and the families managing a modest social life. Here, the story of one such family unfolds under the looming shadow of the prison. Olivia is born the year her parents move to Alcatraz, and the disintegration of her family is told mostly through her innocent perspective. Chapters of her observations on her mother's diminishing mental state and her siblings' ironic delinquency are intermingled with riveting sections on the history of Alcatraz, prison policy, and famous escape attempts, along with a flashback narrative of Olivia's parents as newlyweds. Vivian, the brilliant daughter of radicals, is sent back east for college, where she meets Arthur, a handsome and authoritative law student. When they suddenly marry, the contours of their relationship begin to shift—the fiercely independent Vivian becomes passive and accommodating to please Arthur, while he quits school so that he can support his wife like a ``man.'' Years later, isolated on the island, with three children, a rigid husband, and broken dreams, Vivian begins the sad decline Olivia is witness to. Aptly, the prison and a prison guard husband become a metaphor for the stultifying life offered women in the '50s, while the failed attempts at escape symbolize the futile struggle to break cemented domestic patterns. Olivia grows into a rather lonely, friendless young woman, enduring the physical and mental alienation the island creates. Only when she finally escapes the island does she discover a sense of identity and triumph. A compelling story, richly evoking a time and place.
Pub Date: April 24, 1997
ISBN: 0-571-19910-1
Page Count: 266
Publisher: Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1997
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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