Provocative subject but ultimately too disjointed, as ideas and insights proliferate without any coherent connection.
As usual from Howe (Famous Questions, 1989; The Deep North, 1988, etc.), a brilliant, often lyrical novel driven by a strong moral imperative in a gritty, surreal setting—but ultimately overwhelmed by a narrative that tries too hard, and ends too easily.
In a tale written to explore moral ambiguities in an often political context—the question of "un-American activities" is a subtext—Howe tells the story of Felicity Dumas. Descended from an ethnic mix of native and immigrant Americans, Felicity grew up in Maine, where she met Temple, who since her teens has served "the function of boss, seducer, never-lover, and owner of the world in which she was condemned to live." It is Temple who rescues Felicity and her daughters, Lee and Matty, from her abusive marriage, then arranges for her to help Tom, an activist lawyer, take care of his dying father. Tom, whose communist father had not only seduced fellow-communist Pedro's mistress but later betrayed him to the government on a false charge, is the apparent representative of virtue, while Temple—a dabbler in drugs, right- wing politics, and the selling of body parts from Mexico—is the Prince of Darkness who's ruined Felicity's life because she'll always be beholden to him—especially when she discovers that Matty needs a liver transplant. Temple is prepared to help for a price: Felicity must cross into Mexico and pick up a cooler of body parts. Meanwhile, Tom, learning of his father's perfidy, travels to California to see the jailed Pedro and also Felicity, whom he meets up with but can't really help (despite his goodness, all he ever did "was listen"). When Felicity refuses to cooperate, Temple makes a startling confession, but Matty dies, and Felicity sets off on a redemptive journey back to Maine—and a slick happy ending.
Provocative subject but ultimately too disjointed, as ideas and insights proliferate without any coherent connection.Pub Date: June 1, 1993
ISBN: 1-55713-100-7
Page Count: 230
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1993
IN THE NEWS
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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