![]() Here, Jude's ghastly history puts him in a mental universe that his friends - and readers - must work to enter. Yanagihara is fascinated by how we understand minds very different from our own. Even as the book pointedly challenges the neat, happy arc of popular redemption stories - "People don't change," Jude decides - it calls on our imaginative sympathy. Evidently named for the patron saint of the hopeless and despairing, Jude is treated so badly that I flashed back to my mom reading me the book Beautiful Joe, about a dog so cruelly abused that I melted into inconsolable weeping.īesides, Jude's condition is Yanagihara's way of exploring larger issues. The poor guy may endure the harshest childhood in fiction, one that's equal parts Dickens, Sade and Grimm's Fairy Tales. Turns out that everything largely orbits around one of the four, Jude, whose gothic past Yanagihara slowly reveals.įor those who want trigger warnings, consider yourself warned - Jude's tale has enough triggers for a Texas gun show. ![]() In fact, the book's apparent normalcy lures you into the woods of something darker, stranger and more harrowing. Yanagihara has a keen eye for social detail, and reading her early riff on actors like Willem who work as waiters, you may think she's offering something familiar - a generational portrait like Mary McCarthy's The Group or the witty, emblematic realism of Jonathan Franzen. As the book begins, they've moved to New York to make their fortune, and over the next 700 pages - yes, 700 - we watch them rise, lose their bearings, fall in love, slide into squabbles and wrestle with life's inevitable tragedies. There's the timorous would-be architect, Malcolm, born of a wealthy, mixed-race family and the handsome, lame Jude, a brilliant attorney addicted to cutting himself. ![]() There's the kindhearted actor, Willem, and the self-centered artist, JB, of Haitian stock. The book follows three decades in the life of four friends from a posh college.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |