Joseph Conrad's Kurtz as a nightmare headshrinker? The analogy pays off if you stay with this Canadian thriller, but first you have to make it through an obstacle course of intolerably digressive subplots. Schizophrenic spiritualist Lilah Kemp, reading Heart of Darkness at the Metropolitan Toronto Library, sees Kurtz depart from page 92 and walk out; soon he's ensconced as the monstrous head of the Parkin Psychiatric Institute. As Lilah waits in anguish for a Marlow to emerge and do battle with him, Dr. Austin Purvis, a Parkin psychiatrist, wonders what's become of a mysterious patient who changed his name from Adam Smith to Smith Jones to X before disappearing. Meanwhile, Purvis' colleague Dr. Eleanor Farjeon struggles to make sense of a blight that's left eight young patients terror-stricken and mute; another patient, Warren Ellis, becomes the center of a plot to manipulate a research grant from the Beaumorris Corporation; photographer John Dai Bowen's Club of Men continues to recruit boys willing to submit to the members' gaze and Bowen's lens; and mystery man James Gatz moves into a neighborhood that is now home to a Boston psychiatrist named, yes, Dr. Charles Marlow. Death squads of exterminators battle starlings spreading the sinister plague of sturnusemia, and Amy Wylie, a poet obsessively opposed to the exterminations, is committed to Parkin. Kurtz turns out to have a hand in every one of these intrigues, but you may weary of a cast as large (but not as compelling) as any in a George Eliot novel before you find out how. Findley (The Telling of Lies, 1988, etc.) presents a punishingly ambitious portrait of the psychiatrist as contemporary antichrist, but neither Kurtz nor Marlow finally comes to life in his resurrection. You'll finish this recklessly overscaled novel, if you finish at all, with a profound sense of relief.
Pub Date: April 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-517-59827-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1994
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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