Doherty's first fiction for adults (she's a two-time winner of Britain's Carnegie Medal for children's literature) draws on her familiar theme of emotional abandonment but adds sexual repression, superstition, and madness to the mix. The story, set in an economically and spiritually impoverished Ireland, deals with the hard life of Rose Waterhouse. When she's eight years old, her imaginative older brother Desmond dies, and when she's 15, her dull-spirited parents, still grief-stricken, relocate, indifferently leaving Rose behind. Rose moves in with a friend and learns typing; then, at 18, she meets a handsome nightclub performer, has sex with him, swiftly falls in love, and moves into his grumpy, incontinent old grandmother's house. Soon the performer abandons her, but by then she's already caring for his baby by another woman, and when she leaves, she takes the baby with her. Before long, though, Rose realizes she'll have to find the baby a father (i.e., a means of support) and plots to marry sexless, shuffling Gordon, the middle-aged brother of the owner of the boardinghouse where she stays; Gordon possesses a job, stability, and a suburban house. But she also requires sex, and Gordon won't sleep with her, so the drama begins: next door to Gordon's house lives a hunchback named Paedric, a gothic gnome with a fevered imagination. As Rose's abducted ``son'' Edmund grows from a baby into a fat, unhappy child, Rose and Paedric spend their time spinning ever more elaborate tales of lust and adventure, eventually conceiving an imaginary baby of their own; meanwhile, Rose, in erotic rapture that seemingly approaches madness, increasingly neglects and mistreats Edmund and profoundly alienates frigid Gordon, who soon deserts her. Finally, Rose, rejected by Paedric, haunted by Edmund, runs away and starts over again, as she did at age 15. Rich in imagery, full of atmosphere, and certainly consistent with Doherty's earlier writing about orphans and unstable families- -but dour, rather cryptic, and uninvolving.
Pub Date: Aug. 13, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-14442-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
