A first novel that lovingly evokes warm family ties and essential niceness but doesn't much move the reader as it chronicles the life of a quiet, good woman. In the six days between Maija's sudden death and funeral, various members of her family recall the pivotal role this Finnish- born woman played in their lives. Maija, who married a Finnish- American art historian, settled in Seattle in 1948. Soon widowed and left with a small daughter, Briitta, she spent the rest of her life teaching elementary school, studying art, and volunteering for good causes. To her family she was a quiet pillar of strength, dependable in any crisis, especially any that affected younger sister Leena's three children. Leena, who married an American academic she met while helping rebuild a war-damaged Finnish town, spent her life in Milwaukee, but the two sisters kept in touch through a long phone call each month. Now Leena recalls Maija's premonitions: the recent ones that seem to have foretold her death, and the long-ago one when Maija's fears about a relative's wedding day were proved right. Meanwhile, Leena's elder daughter, Kirsti, a literature professor, recalls how Maija helped her when her youthful marriage broke down; the younger daughter, Elly, a drama teacher, remembers that when she became pregnant during her senior year of high school, Maija found her a job and later took care of baby Rachel when Elly needed a break; and Joel, their brother, a freelance translator, recalls how, when he was drafted during Vietnam, Maija hid him in her car and drove him to Vancouver. Maija's funeral, conducted by a Finnish-born pastor, is, appropriately, a celebration of her life. A welcome insight into Finnish culture, with plentiful shared warmth and feelingthough uniformly simple and flawless characters keep it in the most minor of minor keys.
Pub Date: Aug. 7, 1995
ISBN: 0-940242-68-0
Page Count: 206
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995
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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