Jones (Last Year’s River, 2001, etc.) has written a most American of novels, bristling with hard truths.
Eli Singer is a renowned poet whose artistic sensibilities are like "[Wendell] Berry meets Bukowski," but his elegant verse is crafted by a haunted man.
Remote eastern Montana is a place where the wind, cold, and isolation break men and drive women mad, and so it was for 12-year-old Eli’s mother. First a housekeeper for Buddy Singer, bachelor rancher, and then his wife, she struggled with loneliness, boredom, and her failure as a parent. Eli and his 14-year-old sister, Emma, took their stepfather's name, but soon Emma ran away to share the bed of a neighboring rancher three times her age. There was a scandal, then two people died. Decades later, only Eli knows the true story, which comes in flashbacks that expand the scope and deepen the resonance of this tale, one of love and family set against a rugged Old West ethos. It begins after middle-aged Eli is pulled from his isolation by Chloe Barnes. Eli makes a rare trip to New York City to meet with his publisher, and while there, he is introduced to Chloe, a literary agent. The attraction is mutual and magnetic. First, it’s all telephone calls, but then Chloe flies to Montana, and two damaged souls stumble toward connection. Soon, though, the love story is framed by a clash of morality. A thunderstorm exposes a hidden grave; a murdered man surfaces, the corpse suspiciously secreted on Eli’s land inherited from Buddy. Both Eli and Chloe are thoroughly human, flawed people yet sympathetic protagonists. Chloe seeks a hero, a protector, stability. Eli is guilt-ridden, closed off, gut-wrenchingly lonely. With broad strokes painting an eastern Montana landscape and flashes of insight about the people who cling to its land, Jones rides past the softer romances of Nicholas Sparks into the hard country populated by the best of Western writers.
Jones (Last Year’s River, 2001, etc.) has written a most American of novels, bristling with hard truths.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2016
ISBN: 9781632460455
Page Count: 234
Publisher: Ig Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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