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. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. 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. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. 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. While the story follows a predictable arc, its mood of detached alienation has scarcely shifted by its conclusion.Ī desultory existence and teenage perplexity are skewered in a tidily crafted, if slender novel, at times a caricature exercise in empathy.įour 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. Such plot momentum as there is derives from Jacob’s involvement with a female inmate, his heightened turmoil after his mother is beaten into a coma and his decision over whether, finally, to own a conscience. Although successful in evoking the static gray tedium of Jacob’s daily round, Rathbone brings less invention to her cast of characters: the dysfunctional mother the bland if kindly buddy/mentor the risible or sadistic staff at the institution. But Jacob’s inner world reveals his sensitivity as well as his despair and anger, all expressed in the sarcastic tones of a young man quick to spot weakness and falsity in those around him. Moving around from Texas to Virginia, Jacob has spent his childhood dodging blows and running wild, his delinquency culminating in armed robbery. With gifts for hyperacute observation and precise metaphor, Rathbone does a good job of capturing the texture of deadly institutional life as lived and voiced by Jacob Higgins, the 17-year-old son of an alcoholic mother with a taste for abusive partners. The author's first novel tracks the tragi-comic inner life of a troubled teenager in a juvenile-detention center.
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