The ramblings overtake the journey in short order, but fortunately Pearson knows how to string a tale—just not when to quit.
Another shaggy-dog tale from Pearson (Polar, 2002, etc.), past master of the Southern Gothic.
It would be unfair to call Pearson’s tale a yarn—it’s more a Big Ball of String, unraveling without end but never seeming to diminish. Naturally, it’s set in a small town in Virginia, where we follow our hero, middle-aged accountant Paul Tatum, as he makes his daily rounds among the great and the good of his little hometown. Paul still makes house calls, so he has privileged insights into the lives of his clients and picks up plenty of gossip about everybody else. Guns and sex provide most of the entertainment for spectators, and it’s the rare home that doesn’t have some such domestic turmoil on view: Even Paul’s misanthropic neighbor Stoney (a recluse and autodidact who repairs things for a living between PBS shows) turns out to have broken the heart of some other man’s wife, as Paul learned in a dry goods store from two elderly ladies who noticed him staring at the wife in question. Paul has had a girlfriend of sorts for some time now—a divorced mother named Mona, who belongs to a storefront Episcopal church and practices Tantra on the side—but he is strongly taken by the wife in the dry goods store, whose name turns out to be Maud. Unhappily married to a thuggish brute, Maud inspires pity as well as love in Paul, who sets out to rescue her. Toward this end, he enlists the help of Stoney, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Carpaccio’s painting of St. George, which Paul saw in Venice when he was there on vacation with Mona, who’d spent her honeymoon there years ago, before her daughter Dinky was born. Stoney agrees to help, but there are a few complications (and more than a few digressions) involved.
The ramblings overtake the journey in short order, but fortunately Pearson knows how to string a tale—just not when to quit.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-670-03238-7
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2003
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
© Copyright 2025 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.
