Of great literary-historical interest, mostly because of its author and provenance but also for its treatment of...
Long-unknown, originally pseudonymous novel by the canonical American poet, who incorporated some of its themes into his nascent poetic cycle, Leaves of Grass.
Using techniques of data analysis and a Nicholson Baker–esque devotion to yellowed newsprint, literary scholar Zachary Turpin—who previously uncovered Whitman’s self-help book, Manly Health and Training—here revives an 1852 serial novel by Whitman, who, he writes, published it in "similar secrecy." Whether embarrassed by it we cannot say, but Whitman’s aspirational tale of the orphan Jack Engle is solid enough, if obviously and heavily influenced by Charles Dickens and sprinkled with period didacticism: “New York is a progressive city, of vast resources; but in nothing is its energy more perceptible than in its juvenile population proper—their culture and their beginning early.” Honest and always striving, Jack is a good boy dealt a bad hand in life, helped along by the poor and struggling, by clerks and errand boys and foundlings. The story anticipates by more than a decade the rags-to-riches yarns of Horatio Alger, but unlike Alger, Whitman finds little to admire in the upper crust. The heavy in the tale is a grasping lawyer, meaningfully named Covert, who wants nothing more than to undo the legal shield a prescient client has built around his daughter, soon to be alone in the world, in order “to put certain checks on Covert’s movements, and effect, to some extent, a superior control over that cunning villain.” Lusting after the damsel's inheritance though supposedly a good Quaker, Covert is villainous indeed. Can Jack save the day? Formulaic and studded with stock figures such as the “pretty Jewess,” Whitman’s tale could not end otherwise. But is it any good? Suffice it to say that in terms of sheer storytelling power, Melville, Twain, and James need not worry about being demoted in the pantheon of 19th-century American literature.
Of great literary-historical interest, mostly because of its author and provenance but also for its treatment of contemporary social themes.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-60938-510-1
Page Count: 180
Publisher: Univ. of Iowa
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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
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