A first novel, Texas-set, about a young man who comes of age by way of his obsession with tornadoes, the cancerous death of his father, and a love affair with a Native American. What could be melodramatic in other hands, short-story writer and dramatist Hauptman (Big River, etc.) spins out into a fine heartland novel, evocative and moving. Burl Drennan returns to his hometown of Nortex (which is ``like a black hole'' where ``the force of gravity'' is too strong to resist) and lives in the Sands Motel after his rock band, a would-be ticket to the big time, dissolves. He gets a job working for the railroad and also experiences a twister of such force that it flattens the town: ``Nortex had finally made the national news.'' The force of the twister becomes a touchstone for Burl (and for the entire town), and he becomes addicted to twisters, even drives the range looking for them. Meanwhile, his father discovers that he has terminal cancer, though he fights it for a good long time before it takes him near the end of the novel, when one character, empathizing with Burl, says that ``It seems like everybody's getting it. They say it's something in the water.'' Before the close, though, in which Burl faces his fate and goes off to school to study meteorology, he becomes an amateur expert on storms (in part by finding a sort of guru, full of near-mystical information on funnels) and has an affair with Bebe Sanchez. Hauptman tells Burl's story against a backdrop of the town rebuilding itself, deftly incorporates religion, and otherwise makes nary a wrong move while meditating on fate and love before ending the narrative with a railroad wreck and its aftermath. This one is a find, conveying mystery and hard-edged wonder while evoking a Texas that will be difficult for readers to forget.
Pub Date: Jan. 15, 1992
ISBN: 0-553-08017-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1991
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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