An engaging if overwritten tale about a Manhattan couple changed by a house in the country.
On a Sunday drive, Coltrane and Francie Hart, a severely mismatched pair (she’s a medicated manic-depressive and lapsed poet; he’s a Type-A stock trader) stumble on their dream house. Francie sees it as a place to resume writing poetry; Colt as a weekend spot for entertaining colleagues. On moving day, Francie realizes she’s forgotten her medication and decides to try life without it. Implausibly, the only result is that her judgment is clearer—and she begins to see Colt for the unfeeling monster he is. When Francie discovers the diary of Marly Musgrove, the mid-19th-century woman of the house, she realizes there’s a cemetery in back filled with Musgrove bodies. The result: Colt insists they be removed, angering a next-door neighbor who’s a relative of the buried family. The neighbor kidnaps Colt and forces him to collect the displaced remains from a junkyard. Colt ends up in the hospital, where morphine-induced dreams about his own judgment day lead him to an extreme and unlikely turn. He helps his dying father get out of prison (after spending the last several years pretending he was dead); drops the charges against the neighbor; and apologizes to Francie. Colt is the novel’s weakest link, and, unfortunately, gets the most attention; by the time he turns over a new leaf, he’s already been portrayed as so emotionally detached that it’s difficult to believe (or care about) his new self. Throughout, the Musgroves’ tragedy-laden family history, including a well-paced revelation about a murder in the family, is skillfully woven into the story, and serves as an interesting backdrop to Francie and Colt’s domestic trials. But Kowalski’s eye for detail and character is so much stronger in the Musgrove passages that one wishes the Harts were nearly as believable and compelling.
An uneven fourth outing by Kowalski (The Adventures of Flash Jackson, 2003, etc.), with a unique and nicely textured historical subplot that’s outweighed by the plodding tone and somewhat convoluted main story.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-621137-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2004
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
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While a few weeks ago it seemed as if Praeger would have a two month lead over Dutton in their presentation of this Soviet best seller, both the "authorized" edition (Dutton's) and the "unauthorized" (Praeger's) will appear almost simultaneously. There has been considerable advance attention on what appears to be as much of a publishing cause celebre here as the original appearance of the book in Russia. Without entering into the scrimmage, or dismissing it as a plague on both your houses, we will limit ourselves to a few facts. Royalties from the "unauthorized" edition will go to the International Rescue Committee; Dutton with their contracted edition is adhering to copyright conventions. The Praeger edition has two translators and one of them is the translator of Doctor Zhivago Dutton's translator, Ralph Parker, has been stigmatized by Praeger as "an apologist for the Soviet regime". To the untutored eye, the Dutton translation seems a little more literary, the Praeger perhaps closer to the rather primitive style of the original. The book itself is an account of one day in the three thousand six hundred and fifty three days of the sentence to be served by a carpenter, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov. (Solzhenitsyn was a political prisoner.) From the unrelenting cold without, to the conditions within, from the bathhouse to the latrine to the cells where survival for more than two weeks is impossible, this records the hopeless facts of existence as faced by thousands who went on "living like this, with your eyes on the ground". The Dutton edition has an excellent introduction providing an orientation on the political background to its appearance in Russia by Marvin Kalb. All involved in its publication (translators, introducers, etc.) claim for it great "artistic" values which we cannot share, although there is no question of its importance as a political and human document and as significant and tangible evidence of the de-Stalinization program.
Pub Date: June 15, 1963
ISBN: 0451228146
Page Count: 181
Publisher: Praeger
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1963
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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