A freethinking woman turns a rural community in the west of Ireland on its head, in this quaint but unremarkable tale by Keady (Celibates and Other Lovers, not reviewed). It’s the early 1950s when Sister Mary Thomas emerges from the convent to be with her father in his last days, then drops her habit to resume life as Mary McGreevy, a red-haired, green-eyed beauty who immediately sets all the men’s hearts aflutter. She inherits the family farm and does a first-rate job of running it, while an endless stream of admirers flocks to her door. The painfully shy footballer, the middle-aged bartender, the head teacher at the local school—even the new parish priest—come knocking, and each is served with more tea and flirtation than he can handle. But Mary knows her own mind, and in spite of her winsome ways, she’s determined never to marry. This choice, unique in that time and place though it is, might have been acceptable to her neighbors . . . had she not chosen to bear a child. Her adamant refusal to name the father only fans speculation, and every one of her admirers comes to feel the heat. The schoolmaster is the first primary suspect, even though he’s recently married (to a woman who fancies Mary herself). But in time the finger of blame points to the priest—a caring, thoughtful man whose frequent visits to her farm, fueled by a private belief that Mary may be possessed, have not gone unnoticed. Denounced to the archbishop, the brokenhearted cleric is removed from his parish, and in the ensuing uproar the surprising, painful truth comes out. A fond depiction of Irish country life, but the surfeit of country characters results in more than a few caricatures. The heroine herself, for all her musical laughter and ankle-flashing, remains something of a cipher as well.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-878448-83-8
Page Count: 260
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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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