A heartbreaking and delicately composed story about the pain of ennui.
In Mattessich’s (Point Guard, 2017) novel, a shiftless young Navy seaman goes AWOL and takes refuge with an artist uncle, who’s similarly adrift.
Twenty-something Jess Cooper is a “sweet, rudderless kid” in the Navy. Many of the adults in his life felt that he had “no fire in him…and he had no particular reason to think they were wrong.” The sensitive, artistic young man still seems unsure what to do with his life, but he feels no special urgency to figure it out. However, as a result of a bureaucratic error, he’s presented with an opportunity to escape the Navy’s despotic discipline, so he goes absent without leave while his ship is docked in San Diego. He seeks out his uncle Milo Manning, a “beach bum” who fritters away his days “time surfing, making art…and eking out a livelihood as best as he could.” Milo lives in East Brother, a California beach town that was once a “haven for bohemians and mystics looking for their chance at Shangri-La,” but it’s now overrun by development and new-money millionaires. In fact, Harry Contento, an unscrupulous real estate agent, is relentlessly trying to pry Milo’s property from his hands. It turns out that Milo is just as lost as his nephew is, but he introduces Jess to a “mogul in the making” who has much bigger dreams: “Jack the Cat,” a legendary heroin addict who managed to become the head of a criminal narcotic empire. Mattessich skillfully constructs an ambient mood of aimlessness in this novel. Along the way, he gets across the extraordinary sense of alienation of those who lack ambition in a careerist age. Jack is an intelligently conceived foil to Jess and Milo, as he’s preternaturally motivated and always ready to leap headlong into new and uncertain experiences. Jess is neither dumb nor lazy, but he is irremediably average; indeed, his ordinariness seems to be the source of his decency and his despair, and the author depicts this conundrum with impressive subtlety. Milo, meanwhile, is shown to be caught between the bliss of freedom and the onerous weight of purposelessness, and Mattessich thoughtfully and poetically captures his predicament: “Life surrounds him, root and branch, in tendrils of smilax and the snares that spiders weave. It turns in circles of awesome fecundity. But he senses its remoteness, too, like a humming you hear only as the susurration of blood in veins.” Mattessich is at his best when he plumbs the depths of his characters’ brokenness and limns the elusiveness of redemption: “[Milo] doesn't know where he stands anymore, or if there is even any place to stand. That margin has become a surface, and it flattens out a little more each day, robbing him of a vital third dimension.” Overall, this novel offers readers an unflinchingly realistic and achingly sad depiction of a profound lonesomeness—one that can’t be remedied by company but, at the same time, isn’t completely hopeless, either.
A heartbreaking and delicately composed story about the pain of ennui.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-578-57261-1
Page Count: 231
Publisher: Urizen Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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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