A first novel that vividly evokes the depressing decay and corruption of a place—West Africa—where things have so fallen apart that revolution becomes palpably imminent, while romance (in this case, between two expat Americans) remains less than compelling. Set in Sierra Leone in the recent past, just before the revolution that destroyed a once relatively prosperous country, the story begins as protagonist Robert Kelley is finishing up his development project on the coast and planning to join his lover Marie in Freetown. Robert is one of those expats who can never really go home again: he enjoys living in the bush, frequently indulges his drug habit, and has no qualms about bedding any number of women. In fact, he seems to indulge in so much risky behavior that it’s hard to believe he’s as efficient an administrator as we—re told he is. Marie, working on women’s issues in nearby Mali, is not pleased with his behavior either, and when the two meet again in Freetown, where Robert has just agreed to take on another development project, they quarrel. She goes back to Mali, while Robert, who has badly cut his foot and refuses to take care of it despite the admonitions of the Embassy doctor, prepares for his new job. With a team of local scientists, such as Prince and Daniel (whose qualifications and talents are ill-used by a rapacious regime that has destroyed the economy), he heads into the bush. The team is to conduct a survey for an aquaculture project under development, but when they meet up with a band of renegade soldiers, most of the men are murdered. Robert manages to escape, but by now his infected foot is gangrenous. Delirious, he finally reaches the coast where he once lived, but his foot can’t be saved. As he recovers, the political situation deteriorates and he decides to return to Marie in Mali. Strong as reportage, but the storytelling itself—together with sketchy, not-always-credible characters—follows weakly along.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-57962-012-4
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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