An ambitious if uneven attempt to write passionately in a minor key about commonplace yet central life experiences.
Responsibility for a dying parent, taking pleasure in a first baby, marriage to a man with kids and an angry ex-wife. Despite her gift for gorgeous prose, Phillips (Shelter, 1994, etc.) is not entirely successful in breathing new life into this combination of domestic dramas so familiar in fiction and women's lives today.
Kate Tateman, a poet in Boston, is pregnant. Involved with the expectant father, Matt, for eight months, she cannot marry him until his divorce is final. Not that his first marriage's breakup was Kate's fault—the ex-wife left first—but Kate must deal with Matt's two young sons' difficulties adjusting to her. Meanwhile, in Virginia, Kate's mother, Katherine, has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Mother and daughter are close, with few frictions, and no one questions that Kate will be Katherine's primary caretaker when the time comes. As Kate's pregnancy progresses, so does Katherine's cancer, and she moves in with Kate and Matt in Boston. The baby is born, Matt and Kate marry, Matt's sons make noisy, sometimes heartbreaking demands, Katherine weakens. Kate feeds, launders, nurtures. Her often thought-provoking musings are refreshingly lacking in cynicism, although her interspersed memories of a visit to India the year before, when she was free of responsibility, seem a bit contrived. At her best, Phillips builds scenes through sensory details and sharp dialogue. Kate's passionate love for her infant son is particularly well rendered, as is her deep tenderness toward her mother. Unfortunately, though, the story itself drags, thanks in part to needlessly repetitive bits of basic information. Meanwhile, Kate's relationship with Matt, who lacks a defined personality, never rises above lukewarm. And because Phillips insulates Kate from any character flaws, anger, or even much regret, Kate feels a little too perfect, too smart, her righteousness somewhat off-putting. No Pampers for her baby.
An ambitious if uneven attempt to write passionately in a minor key about commonplace yet central life experiences.Pub Date: May 3, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-40194-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000
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
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
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