A pungent and lyrical portrait of mid-'60s black protest.
A fevered and impressionistic riff on the struggles of blacks in the urban North and rural South, as told through the prism of The Inferno.
First published in 1965 under the name LeRoi Jones, the first novel by Baraka (1934-2014) is roughly the story of the narrator as he travels through Newark and eventually lands in Louisiana, where he’s stationed in the Army. But though there are interactions, relationships, conflicts, and reckonings, plot details are beside the point here—the novel lives in its language, which is often abstracted but conveys a jazzy, street-wise intensity. (“City is gluttony. Mind you! The sparks hiss and sun drips on leaves.”) The narrator moves from interior monologue, lamenting his struggles as a black man (“The black Job. Mind gone. Head lost.”), to sketches of friends and lovers both male and female, though love is mostly conflict (one chapter, told in dialogue, depicts a rape). The narrative defogger snaps on in the final chapter, revealing a harrowing portrait of a drunken evening off base that devolves into a brutal beating that leaves the narrator raging at his sense of masculinity as well as the degradations of racism. Baraka’s goal wasn’t so much to rework Dante (though the book includes a chart of hell’s levels) as it was to argue for hell as a living concept for African-Americans in the 1960s. The influence of Camus’ notion that hell is other people is plain, but the torments placed on oneself are paramount too: in an afterword, Baraka notes the “torture of being the unseen object, and, the constantly observed subject.” Other writers addressed race more directly, but for all its linguistic slipperiness, Baraka’s language conveys the feelings of fear, violation, and fury with a surprising potency.
A pungent and lyrical portrait of mid-'60s black protest.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61775-396-1
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Akashic
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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