From Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima with Herman Wouk and the Henry family: an even longer book than The Winds of War (1971), with even greater emphasis on "scrupulous accuracy of locale and historical fact" at the expense of emotional involvement. Again Wouk's inbred cast of characters is programmed to be at all the right places and represent all the big issues. Capt. "Pug" Henry is Admiral Halsey's favorite commander—a vital presence at the battles of Midway, Guadalcanal, and Leyte Gulf, with time out to be FDR's Lend-Lease emissary in Moscow and then sit in on the Teheran conference. Pug's wife back home has a lover who's working on the A-bomb. Son Warren is a dive-bomber pilot killed at Midway. And son Byron is a submarine diving officer whose Jewish wife Natalie is stuck in Italy with her author uncle; they will almost escape many times before being brutalized by Eichmann in concentration camps, thus rediscovering their Jewishness. Meanwhile, Natalie's old Polish cousin Berel is escaping from Auschwitz with filmed evidence of atrocities, and Natalie's old flame, diplomat Leslie Slote, is trying to convince the complacent Allies that there really is a holocaust going on in Europe. Very familiar materials, arranged far too neatly; but Wouk is a gifted enough storyteller and dialogue-writer to make each personal sequence—from sub warfare to concentration-camp horrors—flicker with momentary vitality. Unfortunately, however, these sequences are separated by pages and pages of debate ("on the whole, the analogy between Auschwitz and Oak Ridge seems forced") and barely digested history, mostly military (from both German and Allied points of view). As a result, the human stories lose whatever small momentum they begin with: you can see every plot development coming at least 50 pages down the pike. Wouk's seriousness must be admired, but even War and Peace puts people first, ideas second, history third. Here it's the reverse order, premised on the notion that a wholesale retelling—without the focused intensity of a James Jones or an Elie Wiesel-is enough: "they will not have died in vain, if the remembrance can lead us from the long, long time of war to the time for peace." Enlivened only occasionally by Wouk's story-telling talents, such nobly intentioned bombast is likely to be—to an even greater degree than The Winds of War-much-bought and little-read.
Pub Date: Oct. 17, 1978
ISBN: 0316954993
Page Count: 1056
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1978
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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