Eloquently, the naïve American finds heroic fortitude in an ancient, ambiguous land.
An exotic and nimbly fashioned first novel about a troubled young woman hoping to save her marriage while on a cruise down the Yangtze River.
Thirty-two-year-old Jenny, owner of a fashionable Manhattan boutique though she’s originally from Alabama, has been separated from her EMT husband, Dave, for two months. Their Chinese summer cruise is a last-ditch effort to get back together and allow Jenny to scatter the ashes of her half-Chinese childhood companion, Amanda Ruth, mysteriously strangled in Alabama 12 years before. Memories of Amanda Ruth haunt Jenny: as young girls they’d become physically attracted and were discovered making love one day in a boathouse by Amanda Ruth’s angry Chinese father. On the cruise, while Dave sleeps in the cabin with irksome indifference, Jenny meets on deck a 53-year-old Australian, the suave Graham, who is counting his last effective months before Lou Gehrig’s disease immobilizes him—and who, it becomes clear, has Jenny pegged for a final, momentous favor. Over the course of many days, the boat approaches the Three Gorges, where the Yangtze has been dammed—eliminating much sea life and many villages, on the one hand, while, on the other, giving China the chance to perform marvelous engineering feats. The situation between Dave and Jenny deteriorates: Dave beds Stacy, a kooky young co-passenger who’s fleeing her own dependency demons, while Jenny and Graham fall into a passionate, natural intimacy. With affecting elegance, author Richmond (stories: The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress, 2001) moves from Jenny’s past to her present, from her memories of (and guilt about) Amanda Ruth to her despairing hopes of saving her marriage—conflicts that are clarified against a perfidy-filled backdrop of Chinese double-speak. In a splendid close, Jenny, having lovingly executed her final favor for Graham, finds herself in an abandoned village with a blind old tea-seller who offers her, with eloquent finality, “the secret heart of China.”
Eloquently, the naïve American finds heroic fortitude in an ancient, ambiguous land.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2003
ISBN: 1-931561-24-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: MacAdam/Cage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
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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