As always, lots of bang for the buck: much good reading, much of it from obscure sources not often encountered outside these...
The venerable award turns 33 and gets a touch closer to its roots.
Some previous iterations of the annual Pushcart volumes have suffocated under the damp washrag of the writing workshop, staffed with the usual MFA mafia. Here, there are still one too many professors working under the influence of the easily imitated Raymond Carver, with this short-story snippet serving as a representative of the lot: “Frances drinks coffee and thinks about life as a long-haul driver, how uncomplicated it must be. How quiet.” (An academic who visited a truck cab would be surprised at how noisy the damn thing is.) Serving as a useful counterfoil, if perhaps an unwonted celebrity, is film director Ethan Coen, of bookish O Brother, Where Art Thou? fame, who writes of the sorts of things a John Goodman-like character might do with an evening, “nasty things till orgasm grabbed us and we yelled holy hell.” (Take that, postmoderns!) The poetry, as ever, is a mixed bag, including much too long, overstuffed, academic pieces such as Mary Kinzie’s “The Water-Brooks,” but also some fine, more narrowly focused ruminations like Afaa Michael Weaver’s rightly angry “American Income” (“black men know the gold / of being the dead center of things”). Among the nonfiction highlights are William deBuys’s sturdy reflections on the dead things found in deserted woods, some of them put there by the finder long ago; Harrison Solow’s account of the best singer you have never heard, who lives in a tiny village in Wales; and Floyd Skloot’s powerful, hard-wrested memoir of life after severe brain injury. Best title: “Mormons in Heat.” Runner-up: “A Berryman Concordance Against the Silence.” Honorable mention: “Chances Are, Lafayette, Indiana.”
As always, lots of bang for the buck: much good reading, much of it from obscure sources not often encountered outside these annual pages.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-888889-50-5
Page Count: 620
Publisher: Pushcart
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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