A sporadically insightful, intermittently entertaining blend of memoir, literary history, and fabulist speculation.
A man and his wife, Americans, go to England to visit sites associated with the writer Thomas Hardy; while there, the man sees Hardy in an apparition: “Something I missed,” the phantom whispers.
The man, like the author of this novel, is named Floyd. Like the author, too, the character Floyd has a wife, a grown daughter, and a cognitive deficiency—the result of a virus that targeted his brain a few decades earlier. In his new book, Skloot (Revertigo: An Off-Kilter Memoir, 2014, etc.) has tossed together a salad of fictionalized memoir, Hardy biography, and travelogue. Floyd takes off after the Hardy phantom. It turns out this isn’t Floyd’s first “Visitation” (his term); in the past, he’s been “Visited” by Freud, Bach, and Nabokov, among others. Somehow, though, this Visit is different, so Floyd sets up an impromptu investigation. What, exactly, is that “something” that Hardy missed? Something to do with his love life, surely. As Floyd and his wife, Beverly, visit Hardy’s home, birthplace, and other landmarks, they reflect on his tumultuous relationships, gossiping with local Hardy aficionados as they go. Gradually, the reason for Floyd’s ongoing Hardy obsession becomes clear: it turns out that he’s grieving the recent death of his mentor, a college professor who first turned him on to Hardy’s work and, at the same time, inspired Floyd to find his own voice as a writer. But there’s another facet to this search. As Skloot writes, “the chance to make sense of Hardy’s strangeness and struggle gave me a chance to make sense of my own. I was engaged in an ongoing process of learning to live as a brain-damaged man and resist neurological disintegration.” The unfortunate end result is at times sentimental, at other times tedious. The narrative is dragged down by the inclusion of not-entirely-crucial and ultimately uninteresting details: the photos Floyd and Beverly snap, the naps they take in the afternoons, and so on. The passages on Hardy’s life and work veer into blatant speculation, a shaky foundation that doesn’t support the conclusions Skloot draws.
A sporadically insightful, intermittently entertaining blend of memoir, literary history, and fabulist speculation.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-299-31040-0
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Univ. of Wisconsin
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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