A slow, sure novel that burns away the glamor of war.
A fictionalized account of the life of Norman Bethune, the Canadian war physician.
The narrative, composed of a series of letters, begins at the end of Bethune’s life. Addressed to a daughter he has never seen, Bethune’s letters at first seem merely informative. They include rambling accounts of growing up as the son of a strict minister, his eventual break with his father’s religion, his first unhappy marriage and, finally, his decision to fight in World War I and then join the republican cause as a doctor in the Spanish Civil War. The letters are framed by his current life at a makeshift hospital in China where he aids Chairman Mao’s campaign to drive the nationalists out of the mainland. Action-packed to be sure, and yet, the letters become more searching, weaving together world events with a history of Bethune’s love affair with Kajsa, a Swedish woman he meets in Spain during the war who becomes the mother of his daughter. Bock’s masterful narration gives a sense of the urgency of this world-changing moment, and of the exhilaration of being a player on a world stage, and from this emerges an unexpected portrait of Bethune as a manipulative narcissist who specializes in hiding his pettiness under a cloak of disinterested nobility. Bedazzled by war, Bethune trembles with awe when he meets Mao, but he cannot manage to maintain even the semblance of good relations with colleagues who are at least as committed as he to serving a common cause. Blind to everything but his high motives, he does not seem to register that Kajsa is under suspicion of being a spy. The novel’s strength lies in its masterful revelation of Bethune’s paradoxical combination of dishonesty and highmindedness. Bock (The Ash Garden, 2001) paints a picture of a fundamentally amoral, if politically pious, man who does not see that he loves war more than he loves peace.
A slow, sure novel that burns away the glamor of war.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2007
ISBN: 1-4000-4462-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
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