The brutal, harrowing tale of a gutsy young Marine's fortitude in the face of mortal peril: Borden, a savvy student of the military scene (Easter Day 1941, etc.), bases his third novel on an actual incident the USMC would doubtless prefer to forget. Posted as a road guide on the last night of a training exercise in California's Mojave Desert, a nameless lance corporal is accidentally left behind when his fellow Marines return to their base at Twentynine Palms. By dawn, the junior NCO realizes he's been forgotten and sets out on his own to cover the 19 or so miles of barren, waterless badlands that separate him from safety. As the unknown Marine soldiers on under the pitiless glare of a noonday sun, his dehydrated, blistered body begins to fail, and his mind wanders to the salty drill sergeant who told him: ``War is when the poor boys dance.'' Further along his forced march, the castaway starts identifying with Marine Corps heroes who had rendezvous with death on killing fields from WW I's Belleau Wood through Vietnam and on peacekeeping missions in equatorial Africa and the Middle East. More nightmare than daydream, focused on tradition rather than definitive history, these episodic reveries help the lance corporal endure the worst hours of his hellish ordeal. Toward the feverish end of his day, those who marched and fell before him close ranks to escort the doomed warrior who was never bloodied to whatever corner of a better world awaits the souls of Marines slain in battle. Borden's virtuoso performance here decries the wicked waste of meaningless combat and celebrates the human spirit's invincibility in dire circumstances. A work of fiction that awakens memories of William Styron's The Long March.
Pub Date: May 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-89141-545-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Presidio/Random
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1995
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
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
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