A grim, convincing, remarkably assured first novel about the darker byways of the Civil War. Set largely in the isolated mountains and fertile valleys of western North Carolina, Price's story follows the struggles of the once wealthy Curtis family in 1863 to survive one more year of war. Madison Curtis, an influential planter before secession, is a man increasingly hard-pressed by circumstance. His three sons, Howell, Jack, and Andy, are all in the Confederate Army. His daughters are without husbands. The fertile land goes untilled. His considerable holdings of livestock have been depleted by raids from several violent local clans. And then a raiding party claiming to be Union soldiers, but actually a band of thieves, deserters, and psychopathic thugs, rides up to his door. Throughout, freelance writer Price, brings an astonishing verisimilitude to the narrative. The salty, exact language, tough-minded views, hard lives, and bloody deeds of these characters ring true throughout. Behind the lines in Price's South, the law is largely nonexistent. Bandits of every description prowl the backwoods, along with deserters, those attempting to avoid conscription (the draft was as unpopular in the South as in the North), and contending forces of Union and Confederate troops prone to shoot first and ask questions later. There are many small, confused skirmishes, ambushes, and atrocities. Price moves back and forth between the sufferings of the Curtis family and the experiences of their boys at the battle of Chickamauga, an inconclusive Confederate victory. One of the boys, watching the vast numbers of men charging forward, thinks ``How huge and without pity'' the thing ``about to consume him'' now appeared. Price excels in catching the plight of individuals caught up in this vast event. The prose is occasionally too ripely folkloric, the structure, shuttling back and forth between characters, sometimes confusing, and the ending needlessly abrupt. But few recent novels have caught with such conviction the true texture and profound emotions of that conflict.
Pub Date: June 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-89733-429-9
Page Count: 197
Publisher: Academy Chicago
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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