An intensely conceived study of the varieties of contemporary religious experience that teases the mind intriguingly while never quite fully becoming the fiction it aspires to be. The story begins in the fall of 1999, with the random notebook jottings of a writer seeking a fictional subject, meanwhile worrying the idea of the physical universe’s “profound, disastrous, hopeless infinitude,” and what this may imply about the indifference, malevolence, or perhaps nonexistence of God. A subject soon presents itself: a brass cross disappears from St. Timothy’s Episcopal Church in Manhattan, then inexplicably turns up on the roof of the nearby Synagogue of Evolutionary Judaism. The writer, Everett, makes the acquaintance of Episcopal priest Thomas Pemberton, a freethinking cleric distrusted by his superiors, with whom Everett exchanges life stories. The novel exfoliates ambitiously, as Pemberton bonds impulsively with the Synagogue’s Rabbi Joshua Gruen and his wife Sarah (herself a rabbi); then, following Joshua’s death during a “mission” to Europe, Thomas and Sarah fall in love, and Thomas begins the (literally) soul-searching process of converting to Judaism. Against this spare fictional framework, Doctorow (The Waterworks, 1994, etc.) counterpoints eloquently phrased and argued related “documents”; the story Sarah’s elderly father tells of his experience of the Holocaust; Everett’s re-creations (in free verse form) of his father’s and brother’s service in both world wars, and his own in Vietnam; his sardonic interpretations of the religious meaning implicit in American popular songs (such as “Me and My Shadow”), the avocation of birdwatching, and the culture of movies; and'in the boldest imaginative stroke'his invention of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s diary, which opposes to the Nazis’ destructive Weltanschauung an impassioned defense of the inquiring mind’s potential for creativity. City of God both is and isn’t a dramatization of the experience of questioning, losing, then partially regaining one’s faith. There’s something to pique and challenge the reader’s imagination on virtually every page. But, like the novel it most resembles (Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five), what it actually dramatizes is its own (failed but fascinating) attempt to organize its own teeming content into fictional form.
Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2000
ISBN: 0-679-44783-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 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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