A magnificent debut.
The effects of a catastrophic civil war on a hopeful young society, one energized and conflicted by innovation and reform, are explored with ferocious imaginative power by newcomer Adrian, a Virginia medical student who seems poised to embark on two demanding and distinguished careers.
A superb prologue details the battlefield experiences and early death (at Chickamauga) of preadolescent Thomas Jefferson (Tomo) Woodhull, (fictional) son of feminist intellectual firebrand (and first woman presidential candidate) Victoria Woodhull. Then, in a gradually expanding narrative filled with delicious surprises, Adrian traces the histories and subsequent interconnections of four brilliantly realized characters, each of whom has desired, or experienced, communion with “spirits.” Tomo’s (also fictional) twin brother George Washington (Gob) subsumes his guilt over not having run off to war with Tomo in a busy medical career, and the Frankensteinian invention of a machine he believes can restore the dead to life. His associate, sorrowful Will Fie, and journalist Maci Trufant, Victoria’s journalistic handmaiden and later Gob’s wife, are reluctant visionaries similarly obsessed with their dead. And poet Walt Whitman, grieving for the “boys” he tends to, ever stoically singing his wounded country’s lamentations, enters Gob’s increasingly deranged world in a manner memorably resolved by the novel’s hallucinatory double climax. Gob’s Grief enchants with its replete portrayal of 19th-century America simultaneously paralyzed and shimmering with purpose and promise, a superabundance of quaint and curious (mainly medical and scientific) lore, and such boldly imagined secondary characters as Pickie Beecher, an oddly prophetic youngster of seemingly unearthly origins, and the sinister Urfeist, Gob’s terrifying “tutor”—who may be a projection of the high-strung inventor’s fragmenting psyche. Adrian ends it all smashingly, as Gob makes the ultimate sacrifice, and, in a way none have foreseen, the lost Tomo is made to live again.
A magnificent debut.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2001
ISBN: 0-7679-0281-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2000
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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