To humorist Baldwin, the only thing more laughable than an eccentric old southern family—the subject of his first novel, The Hard to Catch Mercy (1993)—is the type of egghead academic who hopes to exploit such a family for career purposes. And, here, Baldwin heaps on the scorn thickly, burying his simple historical tale in satire and fable. With the broadest of comic strokes, Baldwin introduces his extremely wimpy historian, Paul Danvers, a junior professor at a podunk state college in South Carolina. With pipe, moustache, and patched elbows, Paul discovers that one of his students is a descendant of the famed Fennel family, a coastal clan whose ancestors maintained an important lighthouse for two centuries. Striking up a listless affair with the diffident coed, Danvers is invited to the family manse, a building as odd as its inhabitants. Presiding over the family archives is Camilla Fennel, a haughty dowager insanely protective of the Fennel legacy. Previous historians have intimated scandalous behavior: from abetting Spanish settlers from Florida to aiding pirates who prowled the coast. With tenure on his mind, Danvers weasels his way into the family papers, hoping to uncover even darker secrets: treason, miscegenation, incest. But his manic research in the ever-mounting stacks of ephemera reveals little of real value. Instead, Paul comes further under the strange spell of Bena, the old black Gullah woman whose voodoo seems to control everything that happens in the family. While his girlfriend, Ginny Fennel, tends to her crippled father, Paul is left alone with Ginny's insanely violent uncle Leroy, a Viet vet with lustful eyes on his niece. Eventually Paul, an otherwise paranoid loser, conquers his personal demons when he slips into a dangerous fever (``the Fennel thing'') and realizes his personal happiness is far more important than this crazy family's sordid story. Baldwin's strange yarn spins out of control and sense. His lazy comic style seems more suited to a TV sitcom than ``magic realism,'' which is what it pretends to be.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 1-56512-069-8
Page Count: 298
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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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