America's oppressed minorities join forces in this watered- down rehash of Black Panther/American Indian Movement activities- -updated to include an image of the sensitive male—from University of California writing prof Everett (see above). Black hydrologist Robert Hawks, fly-fishing his way through an early midlife crisis far from a wacky girlfriend back home in Denver, comes from a line of committed dissenters: His grandfather and father, both physicians, eschewed Christianity while embracing civil rights and humanity, to the point of grandfather having his license revoked for treating a gunshot wound on the sly. So, when a pint-sized Indian hitchhiker in sneakers gets Robert to drop her in rugged terrain with a winter storm coming on, and two FBI agents are found slain in the area shortly thereafter, his impulse is to protect her. This lands him in hot water himself, a situation he only compounds by going to find the woman, Louise Yellow Calf, to ask what she was up to. Robert learns that the US government dumped old biological warfare agents into the area, which are leaking into the Indian reservation watershed, and that the dead agents, one Indian and one black, were trying to warn those in harm's way when they were killed. Louise disappears, and, thinking she's in Denver, Robert returns home determined to understand the nature of commitment as his father and grandfather lived it. After meeting with Louise and other activists, he decides to gather evidence about the dump, and having done that commits himself still further when FBI hostages are taken by Louise's besieged group and Robert is asked to lead a supply run to them—over the terrain he knows better than anyone. Some nice touches of humor and essential humanity, but the ground covered here has few breathtaking vistas—and the main character's low-key transformation fails to stir otherwise oddly tranquil waters.
Pub Date: May 1, 1996
ISBN: 1-55597-237-3
Page Count: 202
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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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