An ambitious story of a tough woman’s experiences across four decades.
The first novel of Collins’ (The Hunter of Hertha, 2015, etc.) Midnight Valley Quartet tells the story of a Kentuckian’s long fight for survival.
From early childhood, Randi Jo Gaylor finds the world stacked against her. As one of 13 children in Notown, a poor, white section of Crimson County, Kentucky, in the 1940s, Randi Jo, dressed in sackcloth, spends her days begging and stealing food to supplement her meager diet of beans. Times are hard enough when her father is working as a coal miner, but whenever he gets locked up in jail or incapacitated with black lung, they become dire. As the years go on, Randi Jo confronts abuse, murder, racism, and burdensome family secrets. This traumatic life is seemingly dictated by Notown itself, where “meanness ran in people’s veins.” Randi Jo hopes to escape her environment when she becomes a teenage bride to a young man from a comparatively wealthy neighboring town, but the young couple eventually ends up back in Notown, nonetheless. Decades pass, and Randi Jo goes through a divorce, a violent marriage to a low-level gangster, and further degradation. At times, the tragedies of Randi Jo’s life come with dizzying speed, but the strong first-person narration and sympathetic characters keep readers emotionally invested in the twisting narrative. There are some awkward formal aspects to the novel—a “Fear Angel” motif is heavy-handed, and a 1980s storyline initially feels forced—but the way Collins portrays Randi Jo’s development over decades of trauma is quite impressive. The protagonist is supported by a rich cast of secondary characters, primarily her family members, who deal with the hands they’ve been dealt in their own ways. The scope of emotional experience and brutality in this novel is vast, yielding a rich, evocative tale of one woman’s trials. “Your life,” Randi Jo’s daughter observes, “has been about surviving it.”
An ambitious story of a tough woman’s experiences across four decades.Pub Date: May 7, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-937356-31-6
Page Count: 428
Publisher: BearCat Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 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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