Though she fumbles slightly at the close, Shreve (Resistance, 1995, etc.) deftly juxtaposes a strained modern marriage and a century-old double murder. Jean is assigned to take photographs for a magazine piece about an ancient crime on the granite island of Smuttynose, off the coast of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. She makes the journey to the island by sailboat, sharing the claustrophobic quarters with her five-year-old daughter Billie, her high-strung poet husband Thomas, his brother Rich, and Rich's girlfriend of a few months, Adaline. In 1873, two women were hacked to death on the island, and a third, apparently a survivor of the attack, was found hiding in a remote cave; a Prussian itinerant was convicted of the killings. In an uncatalogued archive in Portsmouth, Jean finds a pencil-written translation of the diary kept by Maren, the woman who survived, and, in a fit of pique caused by seeing her husband engrossed in conversation with attractive Adaline, she pockets it. And thus two dramas unspool side by side: On board, Jean focuses on the easy interaction between her husband and Rich's girlfriend and muses on the estrangement in her marriage. Maren's diary, meanwhile, describes her childhood in Norway and her incestuous love for her brother Evan. Married off to a taciturn fisherman, Maren settles on desolate Smuttynose, soon to be joined by her bad-tempered sister Karen and, later, by Evan and his new wife Anethe. Tortured by jealousy, Maren dutifully maintains her remote household, until, the diary tells us, her long-repressed rage is unleashed. It was, it turns out, Maren who killed Karen and Anethe. In present time, Jean ventures some betrayals of her own, and the small sailboat gets caught in a ferocious storm. The ensuing death at sea, however, feels unnecessary—a sort of cheap shot ending. The emotional losses depicted in the parallel stories are ultimately more haunting. Nonetheless, a highly readable yarn and a complex, convincing exploration of the ramifications of jealousy. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-316-78997-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1996
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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