A heartening, honest portrait of public education and generational responsibility.
A lively novel about the trials and tribulations of teaching in the 21st century.
Mitchell Munson, known lovingly as Mr. Mumbles, is a teacher who has sharpened too many pencils and erased too many blackboards to tell lies. His passion for teaching is very much intact after decades of instruction, but he knows the score and doesn’t pretend he can’t see his tiny role in the great social sift. This witty, sardonic but never cynical approach to education and society is evidenced in his playful inner-monologues and the incessant discursive dialogues on topics from the movie Titanic to intellectualized fodder like the “American Meritocracy.” Like the best students, Mumbles still questions. Coach Jackson is, as befitting his station, more methodical and strategic in his approach to teaching and life. His simple vision of social progress is analogized in his relationship to basketball, a sport he believes has progressed and evolved into a superior form over the 20th century–a sport which has charted America’s obsession with perfection but also its disappointing civil relationships. The game, he concludes, is better than it was 50 years ago–though he’s quite certain Jerry West would have held his own in a modern game. Mumbles and Jackson, more than being a simple odd couple, are more the split-protagonists of the novel. They represent complementary and often contradictory attitudes, but their dialectic may be essential in rearing a generation capable of navigating the future. An epistolary subplot develops after Jackson finds letters his mother penned during his father’s service in the World War II. These elements aren’t always set as elegantly in the broader narrative as could be, but the letters are so compelling–even heartbreaking–that is likely due to all the rhetorical ground Bennett wants to cover. Still, Mumbles and Jackson’s friendship makes the novel memorable and satisfying.
A heartening, honest portrait of public education and generational responsibility.Pub Date: March 4, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-578-00804-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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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