More pleasures here from the novel’s moral clarity than from those traditional sources, plot and character.
How do you prepare for death? With bare feet and a head full of precepts, if you’re the protagonist of Brewer’s didactic first outing.
After learning he’s terminally ill with tuberculosis, the first thing Henry Stuart does is discard his boots. His sudden contact with the earth is restorative. And the 67-year-old retired professor will make many more changes to his life in Nampa, Idaho (the year is 1925). Strongly influenced by Tolstoy, he’ll give up his house and land to his two sons. He’ll move to Fairhope, Alabama, a “reform community” opposed to rampant capitalism. There, on cliffs above Mobile Bay, he will build a round hut out of concrete (Stuart did exist, and the hut still does; Fairhope is Brewer’s hometown), following a vision that comes to him in a dream about a bird’s nest and Black Elk. Henry’s ideas are a synthesis of Tolstoy, Thoreau, and the Oglala Sioux medicine man. He’s convinced he can overcome fear of death by moving from a material to a spiritual plane, while the challenge of manual work, done by himself alone, will be “soul-perfecting.” In fact, he’s a set of quirks and ideals who stops just short of being a fully realized fictional character. His moral evolution is the thing, and so his family relationships go unexplored. Does he even like the sons he left behind? To his kindly Alabama neighbors, he sometimes seems just crabby. Brewer’s account of the hut construction is plodding (Masonry 101), but he does enliven his austere tale with two hurricanes and a near-fatal moccasin attack. Then, in the midst of the second hurricane, Henry has a road-to-Damascus epiphany: He will not die anytime soon, but must reach out to others.
More pleasures here from the novel’s moral clarity than from those traditional sources, plot and character.Pub Date: March 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-345-47631-X
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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