A brilliant and imaginative tale of love, death, and literature.
Orem (Killer of Crying Deer, 2010, etc.) delivers a fictionalized account of the life of Dracula author Bram Stoker and the incidents that led him to create one of literature’s greatest monsters.
How does a single story command the high and low, the beautiful and the ghastly, the sacred and the profane? Or, as this novel asks, how does a single man contain these multitudes? In flowing, lyrical, and sometimes-unsettling third-person narration, Orem offers dark speculations on the life and mind of Abraham “Bram” Stoker. As the novel tells it, Bram is haunted from a young age—first by his own childhood illness and then, possibly, by literal ghosts. Despite the fact that his father seemed to give up on the possibility that he’d thrive or succeed in life, Stoker eventually joins the Lyceum Theatre as an aide to renowned actor Henry Irving. But life behind the footlights is not all well, and although Bram gets the opportunity to mix with high society and literary idols such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Walt Whitman, and Oscar Wilde, he remains very much in Irving’s shadow. The book is at its most powerful when the distant narration combines with Bram’s psychology to create a feverish, even horrifying landscape of thought; on the one hand, Bram idolizes Irving and treasures his own proximity to greatness, but on the other, he’s sickened by his own lack of literary success and seems overcome by envy. He’s also shown to be torn between his wife, Florence—a beautiful, aristocratic woman who’s emblematic of the society he wishes to join—and Lujzi Sido, a sweatshop worker who lives in squalid conditions but who makes him feel more alive than anyone else does. Personal and historical parallels later appear in Stoker’s greatest work, as faith, class differences, violence, beauty, and death coalesce in the figure of Dracula. But intriguingly, where Bram sees himself in that tale remains a constantly moving target.
A brilliant and imaginative tale of love, death, and literature.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-940724-20-1
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Gival Press
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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