Part elegy, part master-student story, part road-trip Americana, Williams riffs on the dichotomy between appearance and...
Williams (The Mimic’s Own Voice, 2011) hits the road with bluesmen Brother Ben and Silent Sam.
"[S]moking dynamite and drinking TNT," Brother Ben makes magic moaning the blues and slide-fingering a beat-up guitar. Ben, the last "True Delta Bluesman," works with sideman Silent Sam Stamps, who wrings a blues harp till it cries like his hero, Sonny Boy Williamson. Brother Ben is Wilton Mabry, his real identity employed as the name of the pair’s parsimonious manager. Silent Sam is Peter Owens, a Big Ten cum laude graduate, middle-class boy captured by the blues wailing on Detroit radio direct from the Delta. In the year 2000, working to keep the Brother Ben legend alive with a 1976 Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham and thrift store two-for-a-dollar polyester flares and iridescent shirts, the duo leave Los Angeles and wander coast to coast playing roots music. Brother Ben’s fans bring him pints of Old Crow, but Ben prefers steamed vegetables, green tea, brown rice and his Volvo. For talkative, curious Peter, Silent Sam’s also an act, all shuffle and jive, yas suh, while worrying "[t]hat the act doesn’t ruin how much the music means to me." While this is a road-trip story, it’s also a more profound experience—a sometimes-sardonic, sophisticated take on race in America, on fame, on mostly white artistic wannabes and acolytes co-opting black experience. There’s the Canadian investor replicating a Delta juke joint in Las Vegas; and Audrey and April, attempting to bed every circuit-riding blues musician; and the poseur rappers, N2K Posse, sampling Brother Ben for their hook. With allusions to cultural touchstones from Elvis to Robert Johnson, from Cosby to Oscar Wilde, Williams’ metaphorical tale addresses the dualities African-Americans navigate in the American cultural maze while also dealing with the truths we all tell ourselves and the truths we let others see.
Part elegy, part master-student story, part road-trip Americana, Williams riffs on the dichotomy between appearance and reality.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-9884804-4-5
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Curbside Splendor
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
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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