Tangled bloodlines among rootless Irish rogues on the prairie. A cult novel is born.
Some novels leave nothing more than footprints in the sand to fade away or be filled in. Jordan (It's a Hard Cow, a short-story sheaf not reviewed here) has revised his debut novel, first published in Canada, for US publication, clearly hoping for a lasting footprint.
But this is less a novel than a wildly imaginative nonlinear mosaic marked by fearless originality of design and crests of silver and moonstruck language. One swims through its pages drowning in more and more pieces that don't fit together and perhaps never will. Certainly most readers will remain with questions even after the final chapter and its epilogue. It all begins with young Nathan Mann trying to trace his family tree by studying hints worked into some paintings left by his grandmother (whom some readers may well think is his mother). Nathan is the grandson of Eammon, a lyrical Irish thief, con artist, actor, fiddler, master of disguises, and bank swindler. Eammon's son Ryan, himself a master con artist, forever flees his father's grip, but Eammon has some unerring psychic eye that follows Ryan to whatever city he hides in. What's less clear is why Eammon sells both his children, a boy by his wife and a girl by his mistress, to other people. Ryan himself has been twice abandoned, first by his mother, that painter grandmother of Nathan's, then by Eammon—and so has Allison, Eammon's daughter by his married mistress. When Eammon tries to get Ryan to rope Allison into Eammon's swindling schemes, Ryan runs off with Allison and marries her, not knowing she's his . . . well, let's just say that Ryan and Allison become Nathan's parents, although Nathan may be the child of Ryan and. . . .
Tangled bloodlines among rootless Irish rogues on the prairie. A cult novel is born.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2001
ISBN: 1-878448-03-X
Page Count: 212
Publisher: MacAdam/Cage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
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
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
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