This endlessly effluent, Woukmanlike novel which runs to almost 900 pages deals with a typical American family before World War II and up to Pearl Harbor and it is conveniently mapped from Washington to Berlin to Warsaw (the siege) and London (the blitz) and Moscow and Rome and points elsewhere. Real people appear. Churchill and Attlee and F.D.R. who calls our hero, Naval Commander Victor Henry, by his sobriquet Pug and will be heard saying "Good night, old top." In the beginning Wouk almost seems to be competing with Shirer — following not only Hitler's rise to power but explicating its mystique back to the Huns' earlier destruction of Imperial Rome via Hegel and Heine and one character here. His Commander Henry, however, a too hard working (cf. his wife Rhoda), good and considered man, restricts himself to the comment "I don't admire their treatment of the Jews" when he is Naval Attache in Berlin. The Henrys are solid middle-class Methodists and wouldn't go that far — but then they also don't quite like the fact that their son, Byron, has fallen in love with Jewish Natalie Jastrow, niece of the great scholar and author of A Jew's Jesus who lives a Berensonian existence in Siena. Eventually though she has finally married Byron, has had his child, and will be trapped in Italy with her uncle. Then there are the two other Henry children — and Rhoda's mid-marriage adultery — and a good many other characters none of whom seem very alive but then you're never close enough to pinch them and find out. All of it is written in Wouk's solid wearever prose which is not to underestimate the book's happily-or-unhappily ever after ongoing readability for all those faces in the crowd, ours and theirs — those with a lot of stickwhittling time on their hands.
Pub Date: Nov. 15, 1971
ISBN: 0316952664
Page Count: 896
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1971
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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