McIlvoy (The Fifth Station, 1988; Little Peg, 1990) hits his stride with this life-affirming and unsentimental comedy of a widowed thief who finds his much-loved second bride when he’s 86 and she a year younger. Red Greet, of Las Almas, New Mexico, sets the first scene of his story in 1996 (after he’s been remarried a year) in a jail cell (where he’s giving the jail-keeper a dance lesson): for Red, unabashedly full of life and loved by his many friends, has never been able not to steal. But this flaw isn’t a simple matter, since Red has more Robin Hood or Quixote in him than simple thief. Go back to 1915, for example, when he first met Frank (Francisco) Velasco, the strange little boy whose father, a wife-abuser, left poverty behind. What happened if not that Red Greet’s own father, a builder of stone walls, overcharged certain customers and gave the excess to his needy neighbors? Giving and receiving ripple throughout this often hilarious book—little Frank Velasco himself, Red Greet’s best friend, becomes a Roman Catholic priest, then bishop, but ends out of the church’s grace for having (among other most wondrous things), along with Red, “given” the house of a wealthy man over to needy field-workers during the 1994 Annual Hatch Chile Festival. McIlvoy’s novel is lyric and episodic, seeming sometimes a string of stories, but life, tears, comedy, and love pour out of it at all points—for, thief or not, Red Greet is, as his second wife says, “a man with a river inside.” Tall tales, old friends, reminiscences, the sisters —beda (Arlene, Faye, Altadena), memories of school, a wedding in a playing field (the locks having been changed to keep Frank out of the Christ is King church), selling Christmas trees in a cemetery. Says Red, after all: “We were from poor families. What else could we spend but our words, our voices?” Charming, unpretentious, deep, poetic, life-filled. A joy.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8101-5085-9
Page Count: 175
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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