A Deep South town erupts during the Civil Rights period in this ambitious third novel (after Cobb's Hermit King, etc.—not reviewed). Hammond is as segregated as any other Alabama town in 1961, but Eldon Long, pastor of its biggest black church and a follower of Dr. King, plans to change all that. His chief antagonists are the Mayor—banker Mac McClellon, anxious to preserve Hammond's image of racial calm—and Rooster Wembley, one-legged barber and Klan leader. Man-in-the-middle is O.B. Brewster, a local hero because he was once a professional ballplayer. O.B. has a farm- implement dealership with a largely black clientele; he is the only white man Eldon trusts, and the pastor is prodding him to run against Mac. Two white SNCC volunteers arrive; a lunch-counter sit- in is tense but peaceful. Then a boycott of white-owned businesses begins, and O.B. hurts badly; the turning point comes when he returns to his country roots, grasps the meaning of love-thy- neighbor, and decides to run for mayor. So far, so good; Cobb's people may be players in a racial drama first, individuals second, but the battle-lines are cleanly drawn and O.B.'s conversion is powerful and moving. Then, however, Cobb overloads his story with a torrid love-triangle involving Eldon, his wife Cora, and O.B., and with a wildfire romance between O.B.'s daughter Ellen and SNCC volunteer Paul, which triggers a near-fatal back-alley abortion for Ellen and the abduction of Paul and his fellow-activist by the Klan. Paul escapes, and all credibility is shattered when he hides in O.B.'s house for a month undetected. The sure touch Cobb showed earlier disappears completely in a last-minute flurry of arrests, breakdowns, and deaths. When Cobb is good (his taut confrontations, his quieter moments showing old people sitting around being old), he is very, very good; when he is bad, his writing dissolves into clichÇs. A maddeningly uneven work.
Pub Date: Sept. 24, 1992
ISBN: 0-688-11366-4
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1992
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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