The book’s heart seems like it’s in the right place, but the muddle of plot and character makes it hard to get behind.
An ailing anti-government radical plots to reunite with two sisters he loved in childhood.
As girls in Cooper County, West Virginia, Dinah and Grace were left largely to raise themselves as their mentally ill mother was institutionalized and their alcoholic father took up with a wealthy widow. When the sisters come to the aid of Richie, the widow’s bullied son, he becomes infatuated with them, especially the elder sister, Dinah. Written in nonlinear chapters that alternate among Dinah's, Grace's, and Richie’s perspectives, the book recounts the trio’s adolescence, when Richie becomes an Ayn Rand devotee, a calculating entrepreneur (he sells drugs at school), and, most chillingly, a sexual opportunist, assaulting Dinah when she is unconscious one afternoon. Now, in middle age, Dinah is married to one of Richie’s old associates, Ray, and has moved away. Though Dinah and Ray are newly committed to Jesus and raising five children, Richie makes Ray one last offer of work to lure Dinah close. Grace, who still lives in West Virginia and is struggling with depression, anxiously anticipates Dinah’s homecoming. Willis (A Space Apart, 2017, etc.) has written a timely story, especially given that Appalachia was thrust into the spotlight after the 2016 presidential elections by books like Hillbilly Elegy. Willis’ Appalachia is a mixture of well-intentioned but ineffectual liberals, born-again Christians, and would-be domestic terrorists—all the ingredients for a potentially fast-paced drama. But even readers with a high tolerance for time and perspective shifts will struggle to put the narrative pieces together here. And the novel’s biggest ask may be that the reader have sympathy for—and buy into the possible redemption of—a fascistic narcissist like Richie.
The book’s heart seems like it’s in the right place, but the muddle of plot and character makes it hard to get behind.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-946684-34-9
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Vandalia Press/West Virginia Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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