A sublimely sensitive war tale rendered in exquisite language.
A Civil War novel chronicles a teenager’s participation in the Battle of Natural Bridge as a Confederate soldier and his life in the defeated South.
In March 1865, Virgil Hill is a military student at the West Florida Seminary and nearly 17 years old. Yankee soldiers intend to cross the Natural Bridge over the St. Marks River before they march into Florida’s state capital, Tallahassee. Gen. Sam Jones and his second-in-command, Gen. William Miller, realize they desperately need to recruit as many able-bodied men as possible to push back the Union Army, and that necessity is the magnet that draws Virgil into the war. On the way, he meets Neil Clary, a New Orleans native wizened by adversity—he’s only three years older than Virgil, but no one would ever guess that. Neil confesses that he’s a deserter—he ran away from the Tennessee Army, carrying the identification papers belonging to another man, which he is incapable of reading. He asks Virgil to write a letter for him to Ella Mayfield, a girlfriend devotedly waiting for his return. But Neil doesn’t survive the great Battle of Natural Bridge, hauntingly described by Abrams (A Piece of Bad Luck, 1995) in poetically stylized prose: “It is hard to stay collected at first. Hundreds of wild-eyed devils come firing and the high snarl, the sigh of lead looking hard for you can quicken the blood, make you grit your teeth.” Once the battle is won, Virgil treks back to the family farm and attempts to find his missing father, to no avail. He then travels in search of Ella, dedicated to giving her a ring Neil wore, and ends up working on her farm for months, lost between strenuous labor and burgeoning love. Abrams captivatingly depicts the atmosphere at the time—many of the Union soldiers attempting to cross the Natural Bridge are black, and few in the Confederate units have ever seen armed black men before. The sense of prideful triumph from the victory quickly evaporates into despair following Gen. Robert E. Lee’s surrender. Virgil is intriguingly complex, especially for such a young man—never a slave owner but still furious over the South’s loss, he is steadfastly unwilling to submit himself to despair, though he considers his youth spent. The author’s writing is an unusual mélange of period dialect and lyrical meditation, which creates a mood saturated in gravity: “I saw that the body remained in varying degrees of holes and rents, but that the main ingredient had moved away. The dead are not there anymore, is what I saw, and that the body alone is but a paltry affair and no more than a house abandoned.” Readers who fancy Faulkner—both for his expressive prose and his authentic portrayals of the American South—are likely to find in Abrams a kindred literary spirit. The novel’s pace plods a bit in the second half but never fully becomes slothful, and even that modest lethargy is more than compensated for by the intelligence and refinement of the prose.
A sublimely sensitive war tale rendered in exquisite language.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-60489-217-8
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Livingston Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
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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