Points for honesty and grit, though that’s hardly enough to compensate for all the flaws.
A Desert Storm veteran's amateurish and overwritten, if not without a certain rakish appeal, first novel—about African-Americans in the military—pulls few punches in depicting the tribulations of First Lieutenant Sanderella Coffee.
Twenty-nine and just back from a tour of duty in Germany, Sanderella is focused on her illustrious goal—biding her time in Virginia until she’s admitted to Officers’ Candidate School. A single mother of three (by three fathers), Sanderella admits that when matters veer toward love, she’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer. So she swears off men—that is, until she catches sight of Drill Sergeant Romulus Caesar. As the story alternates between the voices of Sandie and Rom (so seamlessly it’s often difficult to tell who’s talking), the two begin a passionate affair, despite Romulus being married, with twin boys at home. He promises Sandie he’ll divorce, and for a certain time their relationship seems promising. The two, neither of them particularly likable, build a supportive relationship, one that helps carry Sandie through hard times: Her older sister has HIV, both of her parents are ill, her superior officer has it in for her, and, to top it off, she discovers she’s pregnant. Unfortunately coinciding with Sandie’s pregnancy is the appearance of Rom’s guilty conscience. He decides to break it off and return to his wife and sons, not wanting to be the kind of absent parent his father was to him. Though overloaded with uplifting convictions as to the potential of the African-American community, a certain raw honesty in the depiction of Sandie and her family redeems the obvious sentiments. Less forgivable is the language, too often ungoverned and unintentionally silly: “ ‘Sandie,’ he said as he reached inside his briefs and carefully extracted his family jewels, ‘this is Mr. Bobo. And he’s all yours.’ ”
Points for honesty and grit, though that’s hardly enough to compensate for all the flaws.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-75777-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001
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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