Fanciful trimmings can’t disguise Mullen’s failure to fully penetrate a vanished world.
Two brothers keep robbing banks after they’re dead in this turgid Depression-era novel from Mullen (The Last Town on Earth, 2006).
Jason Fireson and his younger brother Whit (aka the Firefly Brothers) come back to life in the police morgue in Points North, Ind. They gingerly examine their gunshot wounds—ugly, but they’ll heal, and they’re no longer bleeding. The Firesons will have two more resurrections before they finally die. What’s the point of these Twilight Zone episodes in an otherwise realistic novel? Near the end, the author offers an explanation rooted in family dynamics, but their real purpose is to vault the brothers into the exalted company of such legendary robbers as Dillinger. It doesn’t work. Jason and Whit remain run-of-the-mill lawbreakers, their glamour borrowed, their attributes secondhand, their resurrections attended by bathos; one accomplice, confronted by their revived corpses, says, “I need to go lie down.” They were raised, along with their law-abiding milquetoast of a brother, Weston, in the manufacturing town of Lincoln City, Ohio. Their highly ethical father owned a small grocery store and was outraged by Jason’s decision to work for bootleggers, a move that twice landed him in prison. Pop himself is jailed after allegedly murdering a business partner, another puzzle only solved at the end. The brothers’ final heists and three deaths occur during two weeks in August 1934. That’s a nice, compact time frame, sabotaged by frequent flashbacks, point-of-view switches and Mullen’s determination to cram in as much canned Depression background as he can. He regales us with breadlines, Hoovervilles, reverse evictions and those brutal marathon dances. There’s also a subplot involving the kidnapping of Jason’s moll, or rather super-moll, beautiful automotive heiress Darcy Windham. By the end we’re too exhausted to care who ratted out Jason, a betrayal that led to the shootings in Points North and the brothers’ hectic final days.
Fanciful trimmings can’t disguise Mullen’s failure to fully penetrate a vanished world.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6753-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2009
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
