Geography is both cure and curse in Parker's second book (after Hello Down There, 1993), a collection of short fiction set in the modern South. His protagonists must often struggle with the burdens of the past as they are tempted by spontaneity, danger, and wanderlust. Their creator follows each tale to its proper length—some are novellas, others stories—attending also to the unique voices of his narrators, who range from an innocent boy taken along on a wild ride to a septuagenarian of some literary pretensions. The latter, in ``As Told To,'' is reading his older brother's memoir of world traveling for the State Department, which brings to the surface more than 50 years of envy and resentment. Parker eschews Faulknerian Sturm und Drang about the agonies of life below the Mason-Dixon line, but he is sensitive to his mostly middle-class characters' ambivalence about staying in the South, as when a North Carolinian ponders what might have happened if he had traveled the world instead of becoming a bail bondsman in ``Commit to Memory.'' He also explores the South's meaning through the eyes of outsiders. In the fine story ``The Little Marine,'' a boy copes with his mother's crazy plans after she leaves his father and joins her lover on a journey south. A long novella, ``Golden Hour,'' brilliantly portrays a clash of races, classes, and cultures through the story of strange conflict among a former ``beach music'' legend, a late '60s radical from California, a rigid do- good teacher from Ohio, and a well-meaning vo-tech administrator. Personal emotions independent of geography are treated as well: A troubled teenager finds a kindred spirit in ``Cursive''; fierce, unrequited passion for his ex-wife compels the narrator of ``Love Wild'' into an unhealthy relationship with her peculiar brother. Honest, graceful prose perfectly matches these stories' sense of place and past.
Pub Date: July 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-684-19682-4
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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