Adult western and first novel by the president and CEO of the PR firm Hill & Knowlton; film rights sold to Universal Pictures, with a screenplay by Larry McMurtry. All right, an adult western, but not a serious, epic adult western like McMurtry's Lonesome Dove. There's plenty of blood and daring in this tale, but no villain, since all action is morally grounded. Nat Swanson rides away from a west Texas town where he has killed a man in a fair fight. But the man's friends, believing him to have been shot in the back, set out to string up Swanson for murder. Pursued through Indian country in the parched New Mexico desert, Swanson comes across some wagons beset by Apaches. The wagons are manned by three nuns (a fourth is dead) who have rescued some children being held for ransom in Mexico. Swanson is tempted to go on, leaving the helpless folk to their deaths, but then joins their camp in a gully and helps the nuns hold off the Indians. The leader of the nuns is 67-year-old St. Agnes, who does not believe in killing Indians intent on killing her. Swanson finds himself in a moral bind, trying to save lives without killing anyone. Meanwhile, we join the Apaches and learn their motives for this attack. Although the Apaches have their own moral cat's cradle, they are nonetheless savages who enjoy torturing their victims. Will red magic, Apaches led by People of the Dream, prevail against black magic, the nuns praying in their shawls? Well, Eidson is not B. Traven, who would fearlessly lop our expectations off at the neck, but he does write clean and lean, with a hint of sage incense, and can strike a lingering chord. Should make mellow celluloid entertainment.
Pub Date: April 13, 1994
ISBN: 0-399-13915-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1994
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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