Lustbader’s refusal to allow Jody any happiness whatsoever will prove a disappointment to many readers.
Lustbader’s angst-ridden novel revolves around a young man with a burning need to resolve his child-abuse–riddled past.
Jody Kowalczyk doesn’t look Polish like the rest of his family for a good reason: He was born Christopher Cannavarro, the illegitimate son of a 15-year-old Italian girl whose father refused to let her terminate the pregnancy. Unloved by everyone except his Aunt Marie, Chris spends his earliest years hearing from his volatile grandfather how much he is hated and unwanted. His mom, Marian, talks to him as if he is dirt, and, after Marie collapses and dies while teaching him to play the piano, Marian is forced to take custody of young Chris. Enter Scott, a former Vietnam medic and drug addict. After badly injuring the child, Scott waxes remorseful, but the incident sets off a pattern of physical abuse that eventually, after Marian abandons the two of them, results in sexual molestation. Society, his teachers and everyone else in the world appear to be oblivious to the child’s searing ordeal, which is told in a series of memoirs written by the older Jody, who tells his story to an elderly Italian woman, Tess. Through Tess, Jody reconnects with Ella, a woman he met as a teenager and has never forgotten, and her young son, Evan. In a distracting and extraneous side story, Jody’s adopted brother, Brendan, becomes engaged to a stylish but self-destructive young woman named Fern, who comes between the two men and upsets the fragile balance that has kept them together. Lustbader’s graphic tale of abuse won’t please readers who prefer the seamier details of their stories on the subtle side, but she nails the mental and physical horrors of living without love, approval or basic comforts. And, although Jody’s childhood is over-the-top terrible, few will fail to be moved by the child’s plight.
Lustbader’s refusal to allow Jody any happiness whatsoever will prove a disappointment to many readers.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-7653-3490-9
Page Count: 367
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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