Increasingly prolific with age, Robert Penn Warren—poet, novelist, gut-historian—here regards mortality with his familiar passionate eloquence, and a new ferocity. In "Dead Horse in a Field": "At evening I watch the buzzards, the crows/ . . . / Forgiveness/ Is not indicated. It is superfluous." Sometimes, however, his great rhetorical and narrative power, his mastery of the long line, give way to glibness—and many of the autobiographical events which sparked the poems are cloudily (though of course sonorously) evoked: "Side by side, stroke by stroke, in a fading light they move./ The sea pours over each stroke's frail groove./ Blackly, the headland looms. The first star/s declared." Warren's rush to say something—about Time, Death, God, History—carries hint too quickly into abstraction (though some of these poems, notably "Going West" and "Twice Born," do succeed in balancing ideas and things). Warren claims an oracular authority which his poems cannot quite fulfill—the experience of reading him is that of nearly getting swept away. But his language is evocative, at times reminiscent of Wordsworth—in the lovely "Millpond Lost": "As now you stand dreaming, one leaf, slow, releases/ Its bough, and golden, luxurious, an image of joy not grief,/ Scarcely in motion, descends, till even that motion on the water ceases. . . . In darkness, I've tried to imagine the pond after such time-lapse,/ Or name the names of the boys who there shouted in joy, once." At its best, dark and moving work.
Pub Date: Aug. 12, 1981
ISBN: 0394521366
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1981
BOOK REVIEW
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 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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