You know you've arrived as a celebrity filmmaker when an editor urges you to ransack your 30-year-old shoeboxes in search of a novel as fragmentary and adolescent as this one. The result is both autobiographical (the hero flunks out of Yale and makes his way to Vietnam in 1966) and prophetic (the novel was completed after Stone's teaching stint in Vietnam, but before his military tour began there in 1967). The title accurately describes the tormented impotence of the narrator, who, obsessed with the parable of Jekyll and Hyde, variously calls himself Oliver and William Stone—Oliver, his French mother's son, is the one who's read Goethe and Mill and Wordsworth and Plato; William, his American father's son, longs for the rough life as a heroic rebel. Written under the weighty influence of Joyce, most of the novel is content to dissolve people and incidents in a heady stew of stream-of-consciousness writing by turns allusive and raw. ``Why do I even bother wearing clothes?'' Oliver wonders early on. ``Nothing left to hide.'' But he goes on to reveal much, much more about his tortured soul in its journey from Yale to Vietnam and its dark dreams of 1999. Except for an extended seagoing anecdote that smacks more of Conrad than Joyce, though, non-Stone characters are largely restricted to walk-ons. (``You don't like people much, do you?'' his future wife Isobel tells him. ``Because you don't pay any attention to them when they talk to you.'') Action and monologue alike are so savage—Oliver's volcanic sexual encounters leave him almost as scarred as his companions—that it's a shock to realize how little actual combat appears in a novel that's valuable chiefly as a revelation of where Stone dug for Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, and Heaven and Earth. A must for Stone fans, though cooler heads may find it the most gratuitous literary exhumation since Norman Mailer's Transit to Narcissus. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-16798-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1997
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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