A predictable tale of immigration that offers easy answers to complex questions about national identity and racial hatred.
Ding explores the roots of anti-immigrant racism in his debut novel.
Two men, Sam and Diego, grow up on opposite sides of the American dream. Sam is the son of a Detroit-area factory worker; Diego, the son of a Mexican immigrant in thrall to a drug cartel. Sam’s father loses his job when the factory closes, while Diego’s father struggles to free his family from a life of gang violence; Sam ends up xenophobic, and Diego, a ward of the state. The two describe their lives in alternating first-person accounts until Sam moves to San Diego, where he transforms into a hateful immigration-enforcement officer with epiphanies such as, “How could we let people just come over here and harass families?....And most weren’t violent? What about the ones that were?” Diego, meanwhile, takes up residence with a foster family that’s a caricature of rural dysfunction, including a tattoo-encrusted foster father named Zeke who beats him with belts and even a broomstick. Ding’s prose is clear and occasionally evocative. However, he sometimes succumbs to clichés (“He felt the stinging breath of Sebastian the Beast on his neck”) and overwriting (“It was an empty, dirty cave—a desiccated temple dedicated to the disheartened and disenfranchised men who forewent education for the promises of stability and a good wage”). The awkwardness of some sentences seems to have resulted from inadequate proofreading, as in “And I felt well-prepared to tackle it I.” Although attempting to expose the origins of racism is an admirable goal, many readers may find its insights obvious—for example, that anti-immigrant rage is often fueled by economic turmoil. In the end, the book becomes a passion play with characters that are mere functions of the narrative: Sam hates foreign people, Diego is one. The book’s climax, like San Diego itself, is visible from miles away.
A predictable tale of immigration that offers easy answers to complex questions about national identity and racial hatred.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1500701680
Page Count: 218
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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