One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest meets Memento.
Debut from the point of view of a severely injured and memory-impaired ex-pianist, a character inspired by a real patient the author met while a caseworker.
Robert injured himself 14 years ago in a rock-climbing accident and now can play the Chopin mazurkas he remembers in long-term memory only with his right hand—the other is a stump. He lives in a home with other hard-luck cases, scratching out a fragmented life: he may have a son he doesn’t remember, and he thinks he’s still 23, though he’s really not sure how many years he’s been at the home. But at least he can fantasize about his caseworker and tinker out old melodies on a piano. The story is comprised of a journal Robert is assigned to keep, the aim being to help him focus on his thoughts and inappropriate sexual behavior—the whole edited by one of his caregivers. “So why, I ask her, do we scramble after the words, the images which, even if we get them right, are all but ignored by the world we try to communicate with. ‘Because,’ she says, ‘sometimes we get it right.’ ” We follow Robert through group therapy sessions, wild rides in his wheelchair, visits with Mom and Dad, and eventually through his assault on another patient in a misunderstood act of affection. Once the dust settles, Robert is off through Montana—his home is Missoula—to visit his son, who turns out to be real and in high school. Or is all this part of Robert’s therapy-fiction, a replacement narrative for his missing memory? “When they are too much inside my boundaries, I will escape into fantasies where I am not disabled, where my mind and body function normally, or into fantasies where it doesn’t matter that I am what I am.”
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest meets Memento.Pub Date: June 30, 2003
ISBN: 0-87074-477-1
Page Count: 188
Publisher: Southern Methodist Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2003
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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