Golf as pastoral ode? Not for screenwriter Pressfield, whose captivating first novel borrows more from Homer's record of heroic clashes than from Wordsworth's musings on lakes and verdancy. It's 1931, and while the country struggles through the Great Depression, Adele Invergordon of Savannah, Ga., presides over an exhibition match between Walter Hagen and Bobby Jones held at her family's spectacular new coastal course, Krewe Island. To appease Savannah's city fathers, Invergordon is compelled to allow local hero Rannulph Junah to compete alongside the two golf titans for the $20,000 purse. A troubled WW I vet once in possession of ``every virtue of shining Southern manhood,'' Junah has been wandering the globe, searching for enlightenment in the company of Bagger Vance, his companion, confidant, and sage. Reluctant to test his rusty talent against stellar competition, Junah relents only when Vance, a black man, offers to be his caddy. What follows is not so much a report of the match as a sometimes awkward metaphysical fugue that integrates sport, spirituality, and the quest for individual fulfillment. Vance is no average caddy: He's an immortal warrior god who just happens to groove on golf, offering his champion the incontrovertible wisdom of the Authentic Swing while showing him how Hagen and Jones tap into their auras to reach linkster Nirvana. Junah's 36 holes against the dashing Hagen and the quietly brilliant Jones follow a pattern as old as Hellenistic verse: After a shaky start and the requisite sulking, Junah gathers himself and scorches the final 18. Along the way, Vance teaches him to play as if he, his game, and the course were a continuous expression of the examined life. Throughout, Pressfield displays his limber knowledge of a nobler golfing age, when gentleman players wore plus-fours and wielded clubs with hickory shafts. His hymn to the sport is less convincing when his classicism drops acid—Vance sometimes sounds precariously like Timothy Leary—but such lapses are forgivable. Altogether, then, a swift, dandy debut. (Film rights to Jake Eberts)
Pub Date: May 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-688-14048-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995
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 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
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