Almost poetic in its control and well-chosen details, this novel finds the universal and the unique in a deceptively...
Three generations of an Irish family confront key moments of the past in this eloquent, understated novella.
It’s the spring of 2006, and Ireland can hear the last roars of the Celtic Tiger in an economic boom that peaked six years earlier. Fintan Buckley, a prosperous Dublin businessman of 47, enjoys dinners with his wife, Colette, and three children. His sister, Martina, owns a successful clothing shop in the city. His mother, Joan, and aunt Beth can afford lunch in one of the capital’s top restaurants. Ireland-born Madden (Molly Fox’s Birthday, 2010, etc.) moves the adults through meals, excursions, visits, bouts of insomnia and countless cups of tea. The modest action serves as frame to thoughts drifting away from the present. Fintan, with a sudden interest in old photographs, recalls a beloved childhood friend. Beth retraces the path that surprised her in middle age with a truly happy marriage. Martina looks back on a career spanning retail underling to proud proprietor. Yet shadows hang over everything. Thoughts of the Troubles stem from relatives in the north (while Madden also previews the economic collapse to come in 2008). Joan’s views on motherhood are clouded by the difficult pregnancy and three days of labor that produced Martina. Fintan experiences “hallucinations and strange shifts of perception.” Martina reveals to no one the nightmarish experience that drove her from London. Hers is a rare instance of real drama in the book. Madden’s brief chronicle focuses on the homely and habitual in daily lives shaped by the accretion of memories and enriched by the moments when one takes the time to peruse them.
Almost poetic in its control and well-chosen details, this novel finds the universal and the unique in a deceptively unassuming look at one family.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-60945-207-0
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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