The mind and soul of an assassin are plumbed to a fare-thee- well on a bare Nevada mountain in this startling debut novella by poet and essayist McCord. Fifty-year-old ex-Marine William Gasper, a stalker/sniper blooded in Korea, lives alone in the Nevada ranges and for ten years has favored a cheerless mountain called The Moon as his main abode. Though he has secret bank accounts around the world, he lives out of a sleeping bag and subsists on dried foods and tea. He also rents space in the little town of Sterns, 90 miles away, which he visits as needed. Gasper has given up not only his lethal profession but also most of life's usual habits and activities. He's even given up reading in favor of rock-walking: ``The tongue licking the mustache after a sip of tea holds as much wisdom as a distich by Herakleitus.'' Whether that's true or not, someone with a scoped rifle has been tracking him for days, and along with this shadowy figure Gasper believes he can sense the presence of Cerridwen, the Celtic White goddess who first appeared to him at 18 in Korea and promised to appear to him again, very likely at his death. Gasper traps and kills his stalker, whose ID suggests that he himself was an assassin. Who, among the agencies Gasper worked for, would most have wanted him dead? Although Cerridwen does appear again, it isn't for Gasper's death—though he would hardly care: ``There was the body's delight in itself as long as that lasted, and there was death. Nothing else. Nothing was forbidden, nothing bidden.'' The bloody climax strives to mingle melodrama with essentially believable, albeit unexplained, events. But an atheist and stone killer chased down the labyrinthine ways of the Nevada ranges by the White Goddess? Definitely spacey. And yet also, often, very good. A distinctive, allusive, and highly idiosyncratic novella.
Pub Date: Aug. 8, 1997
ISBN: 0-929701-51-8
Page Count: 128
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1997
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 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
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