A rich harvest of native storytelling.
This entertaining collection, which was left unpublished in 1929 and only recently unearthed, is a fine companion to Hurston’s earlier volumes, Tell My Horse (1937) and Mules and Men (1935).
The late (1891–1960) author of the classic novels Jonah’s Gourd Vine and Their Eyes Were Watching God was also a knowledgeable folklorist, as we learn again from John Edgar Wideman’s tributory foreword and Editor Kaplan’s informative introduction. The latter discusses Hurston’s energetic research into indigenous tales and legends, supported by minimal grants, the WPA, and a wealthy white patron. The stories themselves—ranging from single-sentence utterances to fully detailed and developed anecdotes—are arranged in 17 specific categories focusing on such subjects as gender relations (“Women Tales”); racial inequity and enmity (“Massa and White Folks Tales”); creation stories, many akin to Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus stories (“Talking Animal Tales”); and several varieties of folk supernaturalism (“God Tales,” “Devil Tales”). Frequent use of racial epithets and dialect reminiscent of minstrel shows will probably offend many contemporary readers, but are indisputable evidence of the authenticity of Hurston’s presentations: in almost every case of stories she heard directly from ordinary people, many of them illiterate. There is inevitable repetition, but not as much as one might expect. And there are many pleasures: impudent alternative versions of familiar biblical tales and good-natured mockery of religious truisms (“What in the hell does …[an] angel need with … [Jacob’s] ladder when he’s got wings”); sly references to racial imperatives (a black man falling off a roof notices he’s about to land on a white woman—“so he turnt right roun’ and fell back upon dat house”); a ribald explanation of why women don’t serve in the army, and several clever one-liners about the physical (and marital) problems encountered by snails.
A rich harvest of native storytelling.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-018893-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2001
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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
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