Recollections of the good bad old times can verge into sepia-tinted nostalgia, but the sheer size and splendor of...
A coming-of-ager bursting at the seams with rich stories.
Though the one-named Trevanian is known for thrillers and Westerns (Incident at Twenty-Mile, 1998; stories: Hot Night in the City, 2000, etc.), they’re stories depending on considerable research. This outing, then, might seem out of keeping—set almost entirely on one Irish slum street in Albany during the 1930s and ’40s—but in fact it’s also based on a wealth of knowledge, this time the author’s own life. It starts in 1936, when the six-year-old narrator, Jean-Luc LaPointe, his three-year-old sister, Anne-Marie, and their mother move into a tenement apartment, waiting for their father, who abandoned them years ago but recently sent word that he had rented a place for them and was waiting. Naturally, the bum never shows, and the LaPointes spend the next ten years on Pearl Street, making ends meet on their welfare allowance of $7.27 a week. Jean-Luc is, of course, a bright lad, always leagues ahead of his classmates, a boy who likes only one thing better than playing complicated imaginary games, and that’s stealing away to a favorite library nook and reading. The street itself is richly imagined, with its resident crazies, the vast and boisterously Irish Meehan clan and dreamy socialist Jewish shopkeeper Mr. Kane. Years flip past with little change except the tremors of far-off conflict, but they’re of little matter, as Trevanian is mainly interested in local sketches, with lengthy digressions on the particulars of Jean-Luc’s paper route or the way he steals into movies for free, all lushly portrayed. Eventually, Jean-Luc’s mother meets another man—a decent one she can’t help criticizing for being such a mark, since she’s still in love with her undependable first husband—yet it’s an event that signals the end of the family’s time on Pearl Street.
Recollections of the good bad old times can verge into sepia-tinted nostalgia, but the sheer size and splendor of Trevanian’s canvas wins out in the end.Pub Date: June 7, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-8036-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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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