Unquiet indeed.
McCrumb’s (Prayers the Devil Answers, 2016, etc.) latest combines an Appalachian ghost story with a turn-of-the-last-century murder case.
This tale takes a while to develop, as it progresses at the ambling pace of a one-horse buggy over muddy roads. The setting veers back and forth between rural Greenbrier County in 1890s West Virginia and a segregated asylum “for the Colored Insane” in 1930. In Greenbrier, Mrs. Heaster, a farm wife, worries about her only daughter, the beautiful and impractical Zona, who, at 20, has endangered her marriageability with an out-of-wedlock pregnancy. However, after Zona’s child is adopted out, she meets handsome blacksmith “Trout” Shue. The infatuation is immediate and mutual, and the couple rushes to marry. Zona ignores her mother’s cautions about hasty marriage, particularly to someone whose last wife (Shue’s second) died of a fall less than a year before. At the wedding reception, Shue’s remark about Zona’s weight immediately alerts Mrs. Heaster that her daughter has just married what we would today term a potentially abusive control freak. Sure enough, within a few months, Zona is dead—from a tumble down the stairs, according to her husband—and Shue refuses to let anyone else near her body until it is safely interred. Mrs. Heaster’s suspicions that the death was no accident are confirmed after visits from Zona’s ghost lead her to demand an exhumation and autopsy. In 1930, James Gardner, an elderly retired attorney committed to the Lakin hospital following a suicide attempt, recalls the days when, while apprenticed to the colorful barrister William Rucker, he was second chair in the defense of Shue at his murder trial. Despite the intriguing questions touching on Gardner’s struggles as a black lawyer in the South, the asylum sections, consisting of many courtly dialogues with a sympathetic doctor, are unavoidably dull, since they distract from the far more suspenseful experiences of Mrs. Heaster as she pulls out all the stops to get justice for her daughter in a system controlled by men.
Unquiet indeed.Pub Date: June 20, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-7287-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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