A sort of sequel to The Smile of the Stranger, but twice as long and about half as delightful; Aiken attempts a big, double-barreled saga here—absolutely the wrong format for her tart, airy storytelling style. In 1797, 16-year-old Fanny is married off to 48-year-old press-ganger Thomas Paget, an unspeakable brute who drags her with his three lumpy daughters to a country house (on loan from Thomas' cousin Juliana, star of Smile of the Stranger). . . and he proceeds to make her life totally miserable—loveless sex and cruel repression. And after Fanny bears the son that Thomas wants so much, he responds to her few attempts at freedom (chatting with kindly neighbor Lord Egremont and his lovable mistress) by forcing her to wear a straitjacket/chastity-belt. Will Fanny ever get free and get together with gentle, virile gardener Andrew? Will Thomas' evil past (he was responsible for the deaths of his first wife and his half-brother) catch up with him? These are perfectly fine questions, but they're answered, alas, very slowly. Why? Because Aiken alternates Fanny's chapters with the adventures of Thomas' illegitimate India-born cousin Scylla (beauteous palace governess for a Maharajah) and her brother Carloman (a dark poet): when the Maharajah's son stages a bloody coup, Scylla and Carloman rescue the Maharajah's youngest baby and escape, trekking their way towards England to take their rightful Paget family place. Not only is this mountain trek romantic adventure of the most routine sort (harems, beys, rape, escape, a crusty American guide who may be in love with Scylla); it also hurts Fanny's strong but small-scale story—interrupting it, stretching it out, weighing it down with pseudo-seriousness (Carloman and Fanny are linked by the cosmic image of the weeping ash). And when Carloman and Scylla finally do arrive at Fanny's unhappy house, Aiken must lay on too much implausible last-act melodrama (Thomas, Carloman, and Fanny's baby will all die) to clear the way for a neat, happy, two-couple ending. Often very entertaining, then—but the cheery, even slightly goofy Aiken brushwork (her 18th-century patois gets dippier all the time) is not at its best on such a big, busy canvas.
Pub Date: May 9, 1980
ISBN: 0446906816
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1980
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
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