A sometimes-engrossing, sometimes-overwrought journey to the soul’s dark side.
The notorious Romantic poet spiritually presides over a modern-day fable of forbidden desire, apocalyptic foreboding, and campus melodrama.
Eads’ novel hopscotches between settings and centuries as it elaborates its transhistorical saga of psychosexual hysteria. It picks up with Byron’s storied 1816 Lake Geneva sojourn with poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and Shelley’s future wife, Mary, full of melancholy musings and ghost stories. Out swimming one day, Byron starts to flounder and, before you can say, “For the love of God, I cannot stand to see this!...End my life but show me no more!” he sees the world engulfed in a burning hellscape—prophetic visions he will immortalize in his poem “Darkness.” Fast-forward to present-day Westervelt University and an array of entanglements: professor Adam Fane, a man staggering under several guilty secrets; his son Gordon, a student and basketball star; English professor Amber Oxley, who is carrying on a hidden affair with Gordon; and Gordon’s bluff but troubled roommate John-Mark. The entwined storylines fester with emotional turmoil: Byron has to be restrained by Count Guiccioli’s men from hurling his young daughter from a window; Adam’s mind wanders compulsively to his boyhood homoerotic friendship with a handsome all-American schoolmate. As years pass, unacknowledged perversions propagate between generations. Linking them are contrived resonances—Adam has a clubfoot like Byron; Gordon has a dog he calls Shiloh, Byron’s nickname for Shelley; a latter-day tween actually reads Byron—and, above all, the main characters’ constant, mentally crippling subjection to Byronic visions of ravaged faces and fire. This last motif means the novel frequently bogs down in turgid dream imagery that’s often more tiresome than evocative. Eads is a skillful writer, though, and when he sticks to describing the real world his characters inhabit—the sphere of aristocratic aesthetes and, even better, the brash but awkward jock-ish culture of Gordon and his buds—rather than the netherworlds of their imagining, he crafts complex, convincing portraits of people struggling with sins they can’t quite perceive.
A sometimes-engrossing, sometimes-overwrought journey to the soul’s dark side.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59021-553-1
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Lethe Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Dated sermonizing on career versus motherhood, and conflict driven by characters’ willed helplessness, sap this tale of...
Lifelong, conflicted friendship of two women is the premise of Hannah’s maudlin latest (Magic Hour, 2006, etc.), again set in Washington State.
Tallulah “Tully” Hart, father unknown, is the daughter of a hippie, Cloud, who makes only intermittent appearances in her life. Tully takes refuge with the family of her “best friend forever,” Kate Mularkey, who compares herself unfavorably with Tully, in regards to looks and charisma. In college, “TullyandKate” pledge the same sorority and major in communications. Tully has a life goal for them both: They will become network TV anchorwomen. Tully lands an internship at KCPO-TV in Seattle and finagles a producing job for Kate. Kate no longer wishes to follow Tully into broadcasting and is more drawn to fiction writing, but she hesitates to tell her overbearing friend. Meanwhile a love triangle blooms at KCPO: Hard-bitten, irresistibly handsome, former war correspondent Johnny is clearly smitten with Tully. Expecting rejection, Kate keeps her infatuation with Johnny secret. When Tully lands a reporting job with a Today-like show, her career shifts into hyperdrive. Johnny and Kate had started an affair once Tully moved to Manhattan, and when Kate gets pregnant with daughter Marah, they marry. Kate is content as a stay-at-home mom, but frets about being Johnny’s second choice and about her unrealized writing ambitions. Tully becomes Seattle’s answer to Oprah. She hires Johnny, which spells riches for him and Kate. But Kate’s buttons are fully depressed by pitched battles over slutwear and curfews with teenaged Marah, who idolizes her godmother Tully. In an improbable twist, Tully invites Kate and Marah to resolve their differences on her show, only to blindside Kate by accusing her, on live TV, of overprotecting Marah. The BFFs are sundered. Tully’s latest attempt to salvage Cloud fails: The incorrigible, now geriatric hippie absconds once more. Just as Kate develops a spine, she’s given some devastating news. Will the friends reconcile before it’s too late?
Dated sermonizing on career versus motherhood, and conflict driven by characters’ willed helplessness, sap this tale of poignancy.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-36408-3
Page Count: 496
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007
BOOK TO SCREEN
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