A novel successful in creating a mood of menace.
London-resident Raisin’s first novel is a chilling—at times terrifying—narrative set in rural Yorkshire.
Sam Marsdyke is 19 and no longer in school, primarily because he’d been accused of rape when caught in a compromising position with a girl in his classroom, so he now works on his father’s farm. Farm life depicted here is gritty and grimy and includes sheep-dipping and dog-whelping. Sam’s life has a certain order determined by the flow of the seasons, but things change when a neighboring farm is bought by “towns” (i.e., rich city-folk), allowing Sam to come in contact with 15-year-old Jo Reeves. Given Sam’s past, it’s obviously not advisable to get these two together, but they’re brought together by boredom and by an alienation from modern culture. Eventually things get so bad for Jo at home that she decides to run away, and she persuades Sam to accompany her. What starts as something of a lark, scampering on the Moors à la Cathy and Heathcliff, becomes ominous. After sating themselves in the dining car of a local train, they’re dropped off near Whitby and soon find themselves needing to forage for food. They collude in stealing canned goods from a grocer but are recognized and then become fugitives on the lam. While Jo is ready to return to her cushier life, Sam becomes more controlling, more dominant and more threatening. Because the novel is told through Sam’s eyes, we’re seduced into his way of seeing, and we sense the growing threat posed to Jo but can do nothing about it. Sam’s speech has a quaint, rural quality, part Yorkshire poetry and (seemingly) part Anthony Burgess: “my senses were daffled and out of kilter”; “we were powfagged after our adventures”; “he glegged at his charver but he didn’t know what to do neither.”
A novel successful in creating a mood of menace.Pub Date: July 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-144875-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2008
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
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
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