A lyrical Southern tale of rippling effects.
A debut literary novel tells the interlocking stories of the denizens of a North Carolina town.
In the South in the 1950s, there aren’t any bars. The rich drink at their clubs or one another’s homes. The poor sip at drink houses. Harry Davis runs a beverage distributor in Winston-Salem, though he also oversees an illegal sports-betting operation with his friend Syd Siddon. One of Harry’s employees, Evelina Starlight “Big Rise” Peak—so called because she is the largest woman anyone has ever seen—is a former prostitute and Social Security check thief. Her younger brother, the simple but sensitive Homer Kenny, works for everybody: “Kenny is the fellow who is there if anyone needs anything—The Master of the Job, the Errand, the Task. He works for many people, does many things, knows more than they think he does and keeps his mouth shut.” Benjamin Franklin “Bo” Winphrie runs a drink house, sells drugs, and thinks enough of himself to adopt the first name of rock star Bo Diddley. After a fight about money, Kenny shoots Bo in the drink house; meanwhile, across town, one of Harry’s well-to-do clients accidentally drives his car onto the railroad tracks and is hit by a train. These two events send shock waves throughout the town, destabilizing the usual way of things in Winston-Salem and bringing its communities—rich and poor, black and white—into unexpected collisions. Glenn’s prose is full of color and motion, as here, during Bo’s murder: “The form of Bo stops moving and yanks like being startled, jerking to the right, a pulling back away like un-huh, no, no you don’t, and then Bo’s chin comes up and down like a fast nod and then he cat-dances back to the bar counter and slumps a little bit, but stays more due north than not.” The book’s cast is large, and the narrative hops between characters every few pages, though readers will eventually get to know everyone and can mostly keep track of them. At nearly 300 pages, it’s a long, dense, and meandering tale, but there is plenty about the author’s sprawling yarn to keep readers entertained.
A lyrical Southern tale of rippling effects.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5136-3623-8
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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