A haunted house that isn’t, a cousin who wasn’t, and a young woman lost somewhere between the two are the features of this moody, tricky midwestern tale, a debut in fiction from Williams (coauthor, Raising Lazarus, 1994). Kate Willoughby’s a quiet, serious girl, living alone with her mother in the mysterious limestone house built by her ancestor in a quietly prosperous town in southern Illinois. The family has cast long shadows over her, with her only brother dying in Vietnam and her father, like his father before him, killing himself, but Kate has plans to go away to college—until her mother also drops dead. Uncle Charlie and his two sons, a seldom-seen southern branch of the family, arrive to pay their respects and help her regain her balance, staying on for months; her older cousin Gilbert, purportedly a pianist, goes away for awhile, then returns more or less for good, and he and Kate become lovers. She relies on him to the point of believing she can’t live without him, even though she has cause to worry when he beats an old man to death for kicking their dog. What Kate doesn’t know is that Gilbert is also a cat burglar who’s been stealing the town blind while she sleeps. Shortly after she learns his secret, Gilbert eludes a close encounter with a shotgun, wielded by an irate victim, but missing his nose, and when the lovers go on the lam together so that he can have appropriate plastic surgery, she marries him out of desperation. The knot tied, Kate then learns more than she ever cared to know about “Uncle” Charlie, but with the knowledge comes a release, as Gilbert proves to be a Willoughby in spirit if not by blood. Good gothic gloom, though parts of the story are far-fetched, crossing over from the credibly ill-fated to the ludicrous.
Pub Date: June 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-399-14331-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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