Is this 900-page South Africa saga much more spotty and ill-shaped than Chesapeake and Centennial—or does it just seem so because we can't automatically fill in the gaps of history ourselves this time? In any case, Michener is using his familiar approach here: tracing a region's history through a few families, with a not-always-congenial mix of soap opera, celebrity cameos, and textbook lessons. He begins with a glimpse of prehistoric Bushmen crossing the desert (going south) in search of water, but then he quickly introduces the first of his central dynasties: in the 1450s, black youth Nxumalo is inspired by white gold-traders, treks north to the rich city of Zimbabwe, and witnesses its tragic abandonment; 350 years (and 300 pages) later, his descendant plays Brutus to the Caesar of mad, mother-obsessed Zulu king Shaka (who unifies the tribes via constant bloody warfare); and in the 1970s, Prof. Daniel Nxumalo, non-violent black activist, will be tried for high treason. Overall, however, the varied non-whites—Hottentots, Xhosa, Zulu, Coloured—get relatively little space here, with the prime focus on the Europeans. The Dutch Van Doorns are the key clan, beginning when young Willem is among a group of castaways forced to settle on the Cape in the 1640s: he impregnantes a beloved Malay slave (the start of the "Coloured" population) but marries an imported Dutch bride and, after founding a top winemaking farm (with crucial help from a Huguenot refugee), proudly coins the term "Afrikaner"; his grandson becomes one of the "trekboers" who move east with herds, battling blacks for land; and when English rule comes in the early 1800s, this hinterlands branch of the fiercely Calvinistic Van Doorns will be at the center of Boer resistance-taking part in the Great Trek north to escape Anglo laws, suffering Zulu massacre, reaffirming their supposed land "covenant" with God in the 1838 Battle of Blood River, rebelling against English language and regulation with full-scale (or guerrilla) war, dying in Kitchener's concentration camps, supporting Germany in both world wars, but finally establishing Afrikaner control through slow acquisition of administrative positions. (In the 1950s Detleef Van Doom, seemingly singlehanded, institutes detailed apartheid.) And the English are represented by the Saltwoods: 1820s missionary Hilary incurs Boer wrath by opposing slavery and wedding rescued slave Emma ("his marvelous little assistant with the laughing eyes"); knighted brother Richard organizes relief for starving Xhosa; Richard's grandson Frank is one of Cecil Rhodes' "young men" (soon disillusioned) and performs ugly Boer War duties before standing up to Kitchener; and the 1970s Saltwoods will defend civil rights while a distant American relation digs for diamonds, befriends Prof. Nxumalo, and loves a Van Doorn. A wealth of fascinating material—and Michener does his best to balance Boer intransigence (with its religious base) against imperious English mistakes, to find shreds of decency among patterns of cruelty and obtuseness. But, despite a chapter devoted to apartheid horrors (So. Africa has banned the book), the non-white side of things never becomes humanly specific. And one somehow ends this huge volume with little feel for historical continuity or for the physical setting (a surprising lapse from Michener). . . and none at all for contemporary South Africa. (You'll get far more real sense of the people and place in fiction by Nadine Gordimer or James McClure.) Still, despite these flaws and the more usual ones—B-movie dialogue, preachy digressions, corny coincidences. clichÉs and stereotypes galore—Michener's flocks of fans will certainly get the bulk and variety and epic events they expect; and, when all is said and done, how many surefire bestsellers are as clean-hearted, well-meaning, and undeniably educational as a Michener mammoth? Easy to put down, then (in both senses of the word), but worthy and welcome.
Pub Date: Nov. 24, 1980
ISBN: 0449214206
Page Count: 1242
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1980
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
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
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