A compelling look at guilt and absolution and the cost of each to wounded men.
Hidden guilt, festering sins and the need to bring old wounds into the cleansing sunlight drive the protagonists in Walker’s collection of stories that explores ideas of responsibility and forgiveness with a critical but compassionate eye.
In this universe, men face aspects of themselves of which they were once proud, but those aspects have now cost them a great deal. A tough former assistant district attorney mourns his son’s suicide and looks into his past to find an incident with another boy that helped form a hardness in himself; a community college English instructor becomes ashamed of his proclivity for insulting others and seeks atonement through an unusual form of bingo; a retired naval officer, reeling from the death of his wife, tries to reconnect with his daughter while dealing with his fear of being alone. Circumstances force each of these men—which all of the protagonists are—to confront themselves, and in Walker’s cleareyed, unsentimental prose, they emerge from their experiences changed, though not always for the better. The thematic links are obvious almost to the point of being simplistic, but through his precise construction and observant point of view, Walker saves his stories from tilting into patronization. Although his protagonists have specific ideas about themselves—and in the cases of Milton from “Making Amends” and Phil from “The Lap Dancer,” sometimes delusional ones—they each manage to open their eyes, albeit with significant help in some cases. They take steps to rectify their faults or at least acknowledge them. While Walker’s prose is never flashy, his careful grounding of details and patient efforts in constructing character and setting create a universe of flaws and possibilities, and his stories unfold with a cumulative, occasionally wrenching emotional effect.
A compelling look at guilt and absolution and the cost of each to wounded men.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2013
ISBN: 978-1937677367
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Fomite
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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