Nice Lake Woebegon—like folks have to deal with a Stephen King predicament—an underground fire is destroying their town—in a schematic tale of love, loyalty, and the ties that bind (too tightly). Belle Haven, a small Pennsylvania town built over an old coal mine, is the setting for the leisurely love story that unfolds as a fire in the mine intensifies, eventually forcing evacuation of the people who live there. This is a place where everyone’s nice: people like single mom Angela, for instance, who’s a great cook and runs the local diner; her son Rusty, who’s as nice as can be; and Ed, the generous hardware-store owner. It’s people like these who drive young Rachel Hearn to try to come to the town’s rescue—yet Joe Barrows, a stranger who falls in love with Rachel, is able to view the situation with more clarity. Their relationship begins after both have run away from bad situations. Dutiful daughter Rachel has gone to college and savored freedom, but chooses to return home for good after her parents die in an accident, a love affair ends, and a friend betrays her. When Joe, a wealthy, indulged Yale junior, learns from twin sister Holly that their father abused her, drove their mother to suicide, and lied to Joe about the cause of Holly’s birth defect, he trades his Jaguar for a trailer and lands up in Belle Haven. There, a changed man, he becomes as well liked as Rachel. Still, as the fire claims more victims, Joe, who has just inherited a trust fund, decides to act: he buys land, builds houses, and persuades his friends to move away. Only Rachel resists. Conceding that the town can’t be saved, she decides to travel before coming back to a waiting Joe. A well-crafted debut, but nothing ever quite ignites.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-679-44849-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1998
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
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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