The action is often sluggish and nearly always weightless in this transparently plotted, melodramatic novel about the European conquest of the Carolina coastline, from the author of Bayou (1991), Columbia (1986), and Sea Star (1983). Our story starts in 1587 with the landing of a new British colony on Roanoke Island, just before the birth of Virginia Dare. Then Dare and the rest of the colonists disappear. Next we meet Leah Hancock and her daughters, solemn Tess and charismatic Glory, in a tobacco-raising settlement in 1711. Indian warriors kill Leah's husband and badly wound her, but Leah and the girls escape to a colony of Scottish lumberjacks in Cape Fear. Leah marries the ship captain who brought them there. They all live relatively peacefully until Leah dies of smallpox and the captain fobs Tess and Glory off onto a dashing pirate. Tess marries him, Glory goes to live with them, and the sisters run the household and raise Tess' three children together. Then Glory gets pregnant and dies in childbirth and Tess is left to raise her niece, Della. Della grows up to be a femme fatale and marries Philip Gage, owner of a neighboring plantation called Deepwater. Their marriage is troubled from the start: Philip, who is loyal to the King in the brewing battle for independence from England, is always away for political meetings, while Della and her obsequious slave abet his rebel enemies. Della and Philip take in his daughter by another woman who comes, goes, marries young, and sends her infant daughter, Laurel, to be raised by Della after Philip's death. Laurel inherits Deepwater and marries a Quaker, with whom she helps slaves escape through the underground railroad and raises three children. After the Civil War, newly freed blacks claim part of Deepwater, a school for black children is established, and a schoolteacher arrives from up North. Laurel has an affair with the teacher, but it eventually peters out, as does the rest of the story. The lackluster narrative—a patchwork of animal vignettes and italicized history that the author didn't manage to weave into the story—never quite comes to life.
Pub Date: March 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8217-4485-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1994
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 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
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