A compassionate, well-written novel with memorable characters and skillfully expressed insights.
A Nebraska girl attending a Midwestern college in the 1960s is taken advantage of by an unscrupulous foreign student, something she takes decades to fully understand.
In Goodson’s novel, one narrator is the nameless blue-eyed girl; the other is Sayiid Algedda, a man from an unnamed Middle Eastern country who comes to America for college. The blue-eyed girl, pretty, naïve and trusting, feels responsible for keeping others happy—like so many girls of her generation. She’s no match for the rich, well-connected and sociopathic Sayiid, who manipulates her into being alone with him and then rapes her. He insists on continuing to see her, controlling her through fear and intimidation. She’s already seen how easily a girl’s life can be ruined through gossip, and diplomatic immunity protects him from arrest. Over the years, Sayiid continues to contact her and her family. It’s not until later in life that she’s able to fully confront her experience. Goodson (It’s Your Body...Ask!, 2000) powerfully conveys the girl’s nightmarish, slow-motion helplessness, more harrowing for the veneer of a normal relationship: “I laughed with Sayiid because I could not get away, and I could not live in a continual state of anger. I smiled to survive,” says the blue-eyed girl. Readers are likely to spend much of the book tense and angry on her behalf, so vividly does Goodson evoke her trapped, shamed cooperation. He makes understandable the cultural and family background that keep her silent and the many ways she was set up—for example, by the professors who “encouraged us to socialize with guys whose culture taught them that a girl by herself was fair game.” While Goodson portrays Sayiid as a villain, not all Middle Eastern men are so depicted; Sayiid’s compatriots are characterized as men of integrity. The sometimes overlong but realistic novel shows the slow process of understanding: “In the movies, the heroine gets angry, toughens up, and kicks ass; but in real life, things unfold.” Goodson describes this unfolding well, with a heartening conclusion.
A compassionate, well-written novel with memorable characters and skillfully expressed insights.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2014
ISBN: 978-0976039822
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Red Square Press
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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