Luvaas (The Seductions of Natalie Bach, 1986) takes the story of a family in dysfunctional breakdown and muddies it terribly through the use of different narrators. Aunt Debbie speaks first, diving into an incoherent story about flooding rains when she and her sister Jerri were younger. The rest of the cast is introduced in rapid succession: Jerri's philandering husband, Don; Don's son Olson, from a previous marriage; and Jerri and Don's children, Meena and Jeff. Debbie, Meena, and Jeff then trade off narratives (although Meena's are in the third person), often repeating the same stories without adding any new insight. Jerri is quickly losing her mind and falling deeper into drinking. Don is casual enough about his wife's decline to leave a message for Debbie (a stewardess) that reads ``CALL URGENT. JERRI'S FLIPPED. LOVE, DON'' and to make crude passes at his sister-in-law. (``My half-brother, Olson, claimed Dad finger- jobbed Aunt Debbie,'' Jeff reports.) Meena begins losing her mind and believes that she is a spider. Even a stint at Tranquility Acres can't dry Jerri out completely. The family moves from Oregon to California, but nothing much changes, and hints of sexual abuse in the past and the present—including a false accusation—barely move the plot along. The language used by all the characters sounds inauthentic: Debbie has a fondness for unnatural expressions like ``shit crystals''; Jerri's dialogue is awkwardly written to convey slurring (``Don' you ged it?''); and Meena favors slang like ``retro'' and ``weirdso-nerdso.'' Luvaas seems to want to confuse. At one point he has Olson befriend a boy named Olsen so that readers need constantly to recall which is which. In one of the few bits of outside context given, Jerri is described wearing a ``Jackie Kennedy suit,'' so this is presumably set in the 1960s. But this is an insular, claustrophobic tale told in choppy sentences by an author who takes sophomoric delight in silly, dirty language. Hard to follow and hard to swallow.
Pub Date: Nov. 9, 1994
ISBN: 0-399-13968-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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