This harrowing tale of a husband and father-to-be surrounded by violence remains both gloomy and enthralling.
A novel focuses on a North Carolina prison guard and his increasingly bleak life inside and outside penitentiary walls.
Calvin Gaddy works at Coventry Prison, just like his now-retired father, Mac. As Cal’s wife, Rachel, is pregnant with their first child, he plans to take the sergeant’s exam to boost his income. But Rachel is worried that Cal’s regular pot smoking will lead to trouble if he gets a drug test at Coventry. Still, he’s quietly coping with working at the prison, where some guards, like Mac of yesteryear, are violent with inmates. Jesse Thrake, one officer, is certain that prisoner and alleged witch doctor Tarl “Pitch” Benefit has been “witching” him. Sure enough, Thrake falls ill with vomiting and much worse until the day he inexplicably vanishes. Cal subsequently believes Pitch is cursing him as well, which only intensifies his perpetual concern over his pregnant wife. At the same time, complications at home and work exacerbate Cal’s quandary. The prison captain, for one, is having an affair with his secretary, which ultimately prompts a confrontation between the couple and one of their spouses. Meanwhile, Cal thinks his father is going crazy, as Mac, among other things, is seeing convicts’ faces in the dirt. Cal struggles to balance his life with Rachel and his punishing job. But he may not be prepared once tragedy at Coventry strikes, a tragedy that requires either the cool detachment of a prison guard or the compassion of a family man. Bathanti’s (Brothers Like These, 2017, etc.) grim tale is steeped in religious allegory. Though this facet is sometimes too superficial, it often precipitates indelible imagery. For example, Cal’s dead mother, Elizabeth, was a churchgoer—unlike his prison-guard father. At one point, Cal envisions sitting with his mom after Sunday worship while on a table between them is Elizabeth’s Bible and Mac’s pistol. Similarly, the story aptly examines the fine line separating guards from inmates, as the former sometimes display brutality against men whose crimes are all but forgotten. Cal is incessantly conflicted between his roles as prison guard and devoted husband. Accordingly, parallelisms ensue: As Rachel carries new life, an imminent execution at Coventry assures another will end, and the story even equates an infant’s birth with a jailbreak. But in addition to the hard-hitting drama, the tale has shades of a thriller, dropping in a few surprises, such as more than one shocking death. There are moments of surrealism, too, particularly regarding Pitch and what he may or may not be capable of. Cal has a few unsettling dreams, but the narrative perspective from Pitch, while riveting, is relatively ambiguous. This plot thread results in a denouement that’s likewise open to interpretation. Bathanti recounts his story in a lyrical but appropriately somber prose: “Dead inmates…had been weighted, in the chain-gang days, with granite and dumped in the sump where their bones still ranged like white brittle fish waiting for time to turn them back into free men.”
This harrowing tale of a husband and father-to-be surrounded by violence remains both gloomy and enthralling.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-60489-222-2
Page Count: 261
Publisher: Livingston Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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