Brotherly love never hurt so good.
The messy realities of life and death intrude on a family’s deeply held rationalizations.
Hawley (Other People’s Weddings, 2004, etc.) creates an unsettling, caustically funny portrait of contradictory siblings at odds with themselves, their lovers and their wildly dysfunctional relatives—imagine the family showdown from a Sam Shepard play infused with the more sophisticated existential crises of Tom Perrotta’s novels. The animated preamble opens on Valentine’s Day to find David and Scott Henry waiting in the harsh light of an emergency room, one with a broken nose, the other with a broken fist. “Now that you know what happens,” Hawley writes with a wink, “it’s time to start this story where all good stories should start. In the middle.” Scott doesn’t believe in the basic decency of human beings, least of all himself with his pathetic job (eavesdropping on customer service calls) and his cheating harpy of a girlfriend. Brother David is the proverbial family man, but he’s got a secret. The traveling salesman has and holds dear not one but two families, both with children, one on each coast just to be safe. His anxiety and fears about being discovered are at war with his desire to be free of all his burdensome responsibilities. “You think it’s the hardest thing in the world, to change your life, but really it’s as easy as falling downhill,” Hawley informs us. “All you have to do is let go.” The untimely death of their father inspires an ill-advised road trip with their bitter, alcoholic mother. Subsequent misadventures ultimately lead to one man’s expression of grief in a strip club, another’s unlikely encounter with a higher power and, finally, that world-shattering punch. Hawley’s interruptive ruminations on the nature of time, storytelling and universal truth occasionally threaten to derail his narrative, but the fractured appeal of these rival siblings runs as deep as their angst.
Brotherly love never hurt so good.Pub Date: June 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8118-6429-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2008
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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