A slow-paced, satisfying read.
Acoming-of-age story and a family saga fit comfortably together in this overstuffed easy chair of a novel.
The form of the novel is familiar enough—a sprawling narrative focusing on one fateful summer in the life of a family—but its plot and narrative tone are more complex than usual for the genre. In a small town in Michigan in 1928, the Bearwald family—distinguished father, vibrant mother and two young adult daughters—comes undone. The upright and respected owners of a clothing store, the Bearwalds are the only Jewish family in their town, and the only family with an autistic daughter. Their oldest girl, Cleo, is clever but erratic, and the youngest, narrator Rebecca, is responsible and dependable. Although the family seems solid, the summer’s events show that the relationship of mutual caretaking between the daughters is the glue that holds everyone together. Once the sisters go their own ways, the family falls apart. How they become individuals is the most unlikely aspect of the story: A bootlegger’s ship runs aground after a late-night shootout, Cleo restores it and sells the illegal liquor she finds on it. Meanwhile, Cleo’s mother, tired of being a country mouse, leads people to believe that her husband heads a bootlegging gang, thus provoking retaliation from actual bootleggers. What really sustains this is not the Byzantine plot, but the precisely drawn motives behind the characters’ actions. Just when it seems as though the author will have all the loose ends tied up, he lingers with painful clarity on the dynamics of the family: the way that Mrs. Bearwald’s desire for excitement leads to shameful social performances, the way that Rebecca’s desire for freedom manifests itself in her declaration that her beloved sister Cleo is so sick as to be outside the social order. The depiction of the Bearwalds’ evolution as people and as a family is pitch-perfect.
A slow-paced, satisfying read.Pub Date: April 18, 2006
ISBN: 1-59051-213-8
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Handsel/Other Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2006
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 strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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