Bausch’s engagingly deranged characters hold our attention, and somehow muddle through, in one of his more interesting and...
The interactions of several incomplete and varyingly dysfunctional Virginia families produce both sparks of contention and seeds of potential growth and change in Bausch’s amiable tenth novel (Wives & Lovers, 2004, etc.).
The setting is the town of Point Royal, described in an omniscient overview as an uneasy mixture of southern charm, quasi-aristocratic elegance and trendy crass commercialism. This is where middle-aged Will Butterfield runs The Heart’s Ease bookstore and his second wife, Elizabeth, teaches high school—and where Will’s now-adult children Gail and Mark grew up, then effectively fled from, after their mother (also named Elizabeth) had deserted her family, years earlier. It’s 1999; specifically, the months leading up to “the last Thanksgiving of the century.” But thankfulness is not unalloyed. Will’s widowed mother, Holly Grey, lives in a rambling old house on Temporary Road, in a perpetual state of impending war with her aunt Fiona (her grandfather’s “late-life child”—it’s complicated), whose eccentricities peak, as it were, when she sends Holly to camp out on the roof of their home. Local carpenter Oliver Ward, a widower with an occasional drinking problem, first butts heads, then becomes best friends, with “the Crazies” (as Elizabeth and Will ruefully label Holly and Fiona). When Oliver is hospitalized following a mild stroke, his divorced policewoman daughter Alison makes nice with rootless handyman Stanley, while her sensitive teenager Jonathan eludes menacing schoolmates like the hulking underachiever (Calvin Reed), who’s also harassing Elizabeth. Meanwhile, pastor John Fire (aka “Brother Fire”) labors to aid these embattled souls, struggling to retain his wavering faith and refrain from murdering a younger cleric, who writes hilariously bad devotional poetry. Then Will attracts the attention of sexpot bartender Ariana. . . . The book sounds like fun, and often is, despite shapeless dollops of overextended exposition and uncomfortably close echoes of Richard Russo’s Pulitzer-winner, Empire Falls.
Bausch’s engagingly deranged characters hold our attention, and somehow muddle through, in one of his more interesting and readable longer fictions.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-009443-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2006
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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