Full of dazzling set pieces and flights of urban fancy, Wideman's first novel since his award-winning Sent For You Yesterday never quite coheres—it's a sprawling meditation on "the evil men do to their fellow men," and what holds it (tenuously) together is the "tired old Uncle Remus man" celebrated in the title. A hunchbacked homunculus, Reuben serves the Homewood section of Pittsburgh as a one-man legal-aid society. Decorous and eloquent, this tiny black man works from an old trailer, not much concerned with his clients' ability to pay. With his prodigious memory and mastery of government bureaucracy, Reuben delivers, even though, as we find out much later, his legal education—tricked from the frat boys he once served—doesn't make him a proper lawyer. He's a dreamer who dreams of ancient Egypt, African journeys, and conversations with the dead; he's a man "compulsively rehearsing his own life." Clients' stories break through his reveries: of Kwansa Parker, a whore of sorts, who's accused of being an unfit mother to her boy, Cudjoe; of Wally, a travelling college basketball recruiter, who confesses to killing white men in strange cities (or is it a fantasy of "abstract hate"?), and who tells the story of his friend, Bimbo, a popular soul crooner, crippled from the waist down in a car wreck (shades of Teddy Pendergrass). For every story listened to, Reuben has his own, including a breathtaking tale of sorrow and beauty from his tortured past. Different styles of rage and revenge animate these ghetto-based lives, each of which finds an apposite narrative voice. The elaborate dream-play and interiorized speechifying make for occasional confusion and excess. Otherwise, a truly luminous creation.
Pub Date: Oct. 30, 1987
ISBN: 2070732347
Page Count: 253
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1987
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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