A convincing fictional exploration of human optimism and weakness.
Two Mexican American workers pursue dreams of independence in this reimagining of John Steinbeck’s classic 1937 novella Of Mice and Men.
On a warm spring day, two men arrive at a lemon ranch in Saticoy, California. Juanito Sanchez is much gentler than his huge stature might indicate. After the death of his aunt, who raised him, he’s traveling to Los Angeles, where his uncle runs a small grocery store. Because he’s intellectually disabled, his aunt entrusted his inheritance money to his friend and travel companion, Tomás Delgado. Tomás is sharp-witted and perceptive, but he’s unable to resist a gamble. He insists to Juanito that their lives will be better soon, as Juanito’s uncle has promised them both employment and shelter. Juanito yearns for solitude and stability, and Tomás looks forward to the freedoms that such a job would give him. To that end, he reassures Juanito that they’ll head to LA as soon as they earn enough wages as migrant fruit pickers. However, during their first week in the lemon groves, Tomás takes an interest in Celedonia, the lovely wife of the boss’s son, which creates tensions that lead to tragedy. Gomez (Our Noise, 1995, etc.) excels at creating a sense of impending catastrophe as Tomás and Juanito’s situation worsens. Tomás is a complicated and engaging character who resents the limitations imposed on him by white society and who’s haunted by his wartime naval experience. The narrative parallels to Of Mice and Men are handled well, as the author uses many motifs from the original work to very different ends. The story exposes the plight of Mexican American workers of the era through conversations that address the abysmal conditions on migrant farms and the injustices of a mass deportation effort. In this way, Gomez gives a classic tale new life and sheds light on an underacknowledged chapter of American history.
A convincing fictional exploration of human optimism and weakness.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73311-280-2
Page Count: 154
Publisher: Harrow Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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