A sharply written seaside story that could have had more wind in its sails, had it relied on better navigation charts.
In Clement’s (This Old House, 2011) novel, disparate characters’ lives intersect at a friendly neighborhood bar in Portland, Maine.
“When you’re weary, feeling small / When tears are in your eyes, I will dry them all”: so goes the Simon & Garfunkel classic “Bridge over Troubled Water.” These lines seem to apply to Sean, a lively young businessman and lifetime Mainer whose plans for a vibrant life with his wife, Stella, are cut short when he loses his legs in a hit-and-run. However, he still derives a measure of comfort from his bar, Troubled Waters, in the Old Port section of Portland, which he operates with his business partner, Jacob Morrison. Their 23-year-old waitress, simply named Elvis, has an intriguing back story of her own that’s slowly teased out over the course of the novel. At Troubled Waters, it seems that everybody knows your name—but scratch the veneer of the Cheers-like atmosphere and one finds a hint of menace lurking in the form of bar regular Quentin T. Spence, a troubled academic whose unbridled lust has disturbing consequences. Clement astutely observes each character’s back story, even if Elvis and Quentin get the lion’s share of the spotlight, and the crisp prose is tinged with just the right amount of suspense and intrigue. Despite the careful execution, however, these individual elements stop short of seamlessly combining into a larger tapestry. The novel doesn’t clearly establish the different characters’ interconnectedness before going off on various plot tangents. For example, the story starts by focusing on Sean’s troubles but before long, he’s just part of the scenery when the action shifts completely to Elvis and, later, Quentin’s skin-crawling behavior. After a few more detours, the novel becomes a slickly executed police procedural, but it’s not quite clear whether that’s what the author—and readers—signed up for.
A sharply written seaside story that could have had more wind in its sails, had it relied on better navigation charts.Pub Date: Dec. 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4602-7840-6
Page Count: 306
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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