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THE MEMOIR CLUB
So much uplift can become trying.
The club of the title offers structure for Kalpakian (Educating Waverly, 2002, etc.) as she delves—and delves—into grief and loss.
It evolves out of a class taught at the university extension center (in Portland, Oregon) by a woman named Penny Taylor, who offers such obliquely profound comments on her students’ work that six of them decide to continue meeting with her as a club when the semester ends. Selfless Nell, a nurse at a women’s clinic, hopes that memoir writing will help her friend Caryn, a doctor at the clinic, recover from the death of her children and estranged husband in a plane crash two years earlier. Francine, the socially gracious widow of a professor, intends her memoir to glorify her husband. Jill, a young Korean adopted as an infant by a loving American woman, still mourns the loss of Korean parents she never knew, while Rusty, a secretary to the Portland Symphony, writes about the baby she gave up for adoption when she was 16, before she married and bore three more children. The elderly Sarah Jane, who has already published a memoir about her experience as a teacher, now writes about her childhood—the sprightly memoir extract she writes has no clear connection to the rest of the novel. Gradually, the women’s lives intertwine. Francine, after realizing that her husband led a secret life, sells her house and goes into partnership with Jill and Jill’s loving chef boyfriend to begin a restaurant together. Rusty’s youngest daughter comes to Caryn and Nell’s clinic for Lamaze classes and happens to be present when a rabid antiabortion zealot goes on a shooting rampage that leaves Caryn dead and Nell wounded. Nell recovers at Sarah Jane’s house and marries the lawyer who had been involved with Caryn before her death. With a curve ball into spirituality, Penny is revealed as a heavenly emissary who helps Caryn rejoin her children.
So much uplift can become trying.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-32275-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2003
A LITTLE LIFE
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
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BOOK REVIEW
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BOOK REVIEW
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PROFILES
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PERSPECTIVES
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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
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BOOK REVIEW
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SEEN & HEARD
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SEEN & HEARD
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SEEN & HEARD
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