Informed witness; overly complicated storytelling.
A glimpse of the war in Iraq, as told by the acclaimed author of The King of Kings County (2005) and The Huntsman (2001).
As this novel begins, Lt. Emma Fowler is leading her platoon on a recovery mission. Sgt. Carl Beale is already dead; her team is trying recover his corpse. Beneath the veneer of confidence necessary to command, Fowler is plagued by doubts and anxieties—about the interrogation methods used to locate Beale’s body, about the probable connection between such abuses and the betrayal that led to Beale’s death, about signal officer Dixon Pulowski and whether or not she can trust him to keep quiet about the possibility of torture, about the probability of keeping her lover—Pulowski again—safe during this mission….And then everything really goes to hell. Terrell is a journalist as well as a novelist. He was an embedded reporter between 2006 and 2010, and he covered the war in Iraq for the Washington Post Magazine, Slate, and NPR. Clearly, he has an informed perspective on this particular conflict, and anyone who has read his previous fiction will be inclined to trust him as a narrator. This makes his latest novel all the more baffling. From the very beginning, it’s difficult to understand what’s happening where and when and why. And this isn’t just fog-of-war-style confusion. Even outside the action, it’s difficult for the reader to find his or her bearings. For example, even before the first chapter reaches its awful conclusion, it’s already confusing: what’s the relationship between Fowler’s platoon and a patrol already on duty there? Is it important that Pulowski is installing cameras at this rural location? Are the cameras as important as the recovery of Beale’s body? Are they more important? Terrell’s choice to create a narrative that moves backward in time means that readers have to carry these questions with them as they read and hope for answers. As a metaphor for the latest Gulf War, this might make sense. But it makes for a very challenging novel.
Informed witness; overly complicated storytelling.Pub Date: March 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-374-16473-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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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