68482556.299 Offutt, Chris OUT OF THE WOODS Violence, dislocation, the contradictory yearning for sustaining roots and for the rootless freedom of the road, as well as the difficult negotiations between men and women—all figure in this strong and startling collection. Over the course of several books, including a debut collection (Kentucky Straight, 1992), Offut has been working a rich vein of material, dealing with the tough, laconic hill people of Kentucky, and based on the razor-sharp stories here, the vein shows no signs of being played out. The wonderful title tale follows the efforts of a relative newcomer to the culture—the isolated, ancient culture of those hardscrabble hills—as he struggles to adapt himself to his wife’s taciturn, violent family. Sent to bail a brother-in-law out of trouble in another state, he discovers that the man has in fact been shot by his girlfriend, and died. Without cash but determined to impress the family, he manages to wrest the man’s body from officialdom, then haul it home in the back of his pick-up. In “Malungoons,” a deputy who prides himself on having escaped from the lethal feud that has enveloped several families in the nearby hollows finds, in one bloody moment, that he’s escaped his heritage after all. That archaic Kentucky culture, Offutt seems to suggest, is persistent, inescapable: it broods survivors, but it also breeds despair. Even those who seem to escape don’t often manage to evade the kinds of hard blows life seems to reserve for the powerless and poor. In the astringent “Tough People,” a couple on the road, scrambling desperately for a stake, and well aware that most things in life “will out you or burn you,” sign up for “Tough Man” and “Tough Woman” fights to raise money; they get the money but destroy their love in the process. There’s little good news in these nine tales, but there is in compensation ferocious portrait of an otherwise almost invisible culture, rendered in a salty, spare, memorable prose.
Pub Date: Jan. 26, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-82556-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1998
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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