From the prolific Busch (Domestic Particulars, Invisible Mending, Too Late American Boyhood Blues, etc.), 14 sometimes touching but as often overreached stories. As if straining for purpose or occasion, Busch takes up situations that frequently have a putatively topical or readied drama about them—a mother has been taken hostage in Lebanon, and her family back home moodily watches her on TV ("Reruns"); a white man is disowned by his emotionally constrained parents after he marries a black woman ("From the New World"); an about-to-be-divorced couple visits one of their parents, a victim of Alzheimer's disease who recognizes neither of them ("Comrades"). A sense of falsely heightened drama pervades the TV-like "Dog Song," with its busily kaleidoscopic overlays of degeneracy, hospitals, and car accidents (a well-off judge, unhappy in marriage, may or may not have attempted suicide by automobile), as it does the time-fractured "Gravity" (in exterior time, a basketball game is being played; in interior time, a woman grieves for the death of her adoptive father). Busch's skill and sensitivity can bring about the simple ring of true gold, as in the best piece here ("Naked"), in which a 13-year-old boy in Brooklyn learns unsettling truths about his parents' past when a close friend (called Uncle Rudy) divorces his wife to marry a younger woman. Almost as true is "To the Hoop" (a teen-aged boy's depression after his mother's suicide), but it and others veer into the robustly mannered, melodramatic, or conscientiously routine—"Greetings from a Farflung Place" (a female singer is a has-been at 41); "In Foreign Tongues" (lonely New Yorkers, long in group therapy, meet for a ritualized dinner and talk); or "Ralph the Duck" (a hard-boiled but all-good man—who works as night watchman at a pretentious college—is haunted, though the reader doesn't know about it until it's sprung at the end, by the memory of a daughter who died young). In all, glimmers of real ore peek out amid the standard in stories that often feel self-consciously willed into being.
Pub Date: April 8, 1989
ISBN: 394-57426-5
Page Count: -
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
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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