The diffidence of the title is appropriate: this is a subtle, minimalist portrait of two American couples circa 1953 by the late Dick—a writer best known for his sardonic, pyrotechnic science fiction. Only the second of his early realistic novels to see print (Confessions of a Crap Artist appeared in 1975), this is set in postwar southern California, with excellent flashbacks to a Forties milieu of around-the-clock defense plants and the dogged, weary workers who staffed them. Dick's central characters, Roger and Virginia Lindahl, have gravitated to California from wartime Washington, D.C. Rootless and ill-matched, they stay shakily together until their small son's enrollment in a private school creates a crisis. Dick, whose message throughout his career had to do with the dangers of totalitarianism (seen by him in a thousand guises), once said the menace lurked even in private relationships—whenever "someone. . .is more powerful than you." Perhaps this conviction inspired his focus on the shifting balance of power in the marriage of Roger and Virginia Lindahl. Roger is an Arkansas farm boy, a drifter and dreamer who has already abandoned one family and who sticks with Virginia after the war only because his overbearing, Boston-bred mother-in-law sets him up in his own TV sales and repair shop. His all-too-poised wife Virginia, on the other hand, is a soi disant aristocrat involved in "therapeutic dance," unconsciously hostile not only to Roger but also to her small son. When Roger and Virginia meet another couple with children in this son's private school—uptight Chic Bonner and his slatternly but rather appealing wife Liz—both couples begin to disintegrate. Though Dick never quite brings off Roger Lindahl (he emerges as likeable but too habitually cerebral to be convincing as an uneducated "natural"), he nonetheless writes perceptively of his California setting. If published when written during the 1950's, chances are that this distinctly uncommercial character study would have sunk without a trace. Its strongest appeal in 1985 is likely to be its sketchy but memorable re-creation of the real ambiance of the war and postwar years—an era that popular myth has already eroded into a series of "Happy Days" clich‚s.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1985
ISBN: 0765316943
Page Count: 333
Publisher: Academy Chicago
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1985
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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