The frame is skimpy, and the book’s moral vision can be schematic, but this is a subtly observed, beautifully written,...
The fifth novel by Levy—whose Small Island won Britain’s Orange Prize and was Whitbread Book of the Year—is set in 19th-century Jamaica and covers the last years of slavery and its long, miserable aftermath.
July is fathered by a brutish overseer named Tam Dewar and born to a field slave named Kitty. She’s seized from her mother, renamed “Marguerite,” brought into the plantation house and trained to be the housemaid, chief aide and ultimately confidante to her English mistress, Caroline Mortimer, a plump, overwhelmed young widow. The whites ruthlessly stomp out the “Baptist War” rebellion of 1832—in a harrowing scene, July, cowering beneath her master’s bed alongside the freeman she’s just slept with, witnesses an act of violence—but the end of slavery is nigh, and the institution sputters on for only a few years before abolition. The changes of 1838 seem at first merely nominal, but then a gentle new overseer, the 26-year-old son of English clergy, arrives on Amity Plantation. He promises to persuade the blacks to work for him without using brutality. They’ll plant, cut and haul sugarcane, he thinks, out of enlightened self-interest. Soon the devout optimist is in trouble. First he falls in love with July and tries to resist both the emotion and its attendant lust. Eventually he succumbs, and though he marries Caroline Mortimer for cover, his true spouse is the mulatto he installs in a downstairs bedroom. He treats July with an affection his wife can’t fail to notice or to envy. But as his utopian schemes unravel, so does his relationship with July; racial thinking wins out, and he and Caroline flee for England. Told in retrospect by the elderly July, who’s cajoled and sometimes corrected by her son Thomas, now a wealthy printer, the novel also provides an elegant allegory of storytelling.
The frame is skimpy, and the book’s moral vision can be schematic, but this is a subtly observed, beautifully written, structurally complex novel—an impressive follow-up to Small Island.Pub Date: May 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-374-95086-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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