A second hardcover from veteran western writer Johnstone (after Talons of Eagles, 1995, not reviewed)this one with a bad case of Robert James Waller envysends a 40-year-old ex-Marine back to his native Georgia to fall in love with a 20-year-old waif. Larry Baldwin, a divorced, hard-as-nails Manhattan businessman, moves back to small-town Georgia to find his rootsbut instead finds Cody West, orphaned, beautiful, and honest. She reminds Larry of butterflies (it's Johnstone's literary touch, a recurring motif). Thing is, Larry's new boss, Vic Goodman, the local mover and shaker, hates her guts. The novel thus neatly divides into twothe story of Larry and Cody, and the story of Vic's meanness. After Larry meets Cody, who shocks him because she hitchhikes and crashes in bus stations, he becomes her angel, arranging a job and a car for her, falling in love with her against his better judgment. He buys a house in the country, wondering ``What the hell was this passion?,'' while Cody, for her part, is more circumspect: ``Larry, I'm afraid what I want can never be. But we'll have some memories to keep locked away in some special places.'' Finally, the two make love; lo and behold, Cody's not only a virgin but sensitive (``You have a poetic side to you''). Soon enough, though, the lovers discover that they live on ``different wave-lengths,'' especially when Cody's friends visit and have trouble opening beer bottles: ``I'd once used a broken beer bottle to kill a man,'' Larry thinks. When Vic Goodman's drug- addled son rapes Cody and nearly kills her, Larry beats up the bad guys and makes them pay through the nose: Cody is set for the rest of her life, but she never wants to see Larry again. And Larry? He stops outside the hospital, to reach for a butterfly. A sentimental wannabe Bridges of Madison County, strictly for the romance crowd.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8217-5028-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 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 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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