Brace yourself for the most astonishing,
challenging, upsetting, and profoundly moving book in many a season. An epic
about love and friendship in the twenty-first century that goes into some of
the darkest, most ultra-Dickensian places fiction has ever traveled and yet
somehow improbably breaks through into the light. Truly an amazement—and a
great gift for its publisher.
In its simplest terms, this is a novel
about the long-term friendship of four classmates from a Massachusetts liberal
arts college who come to New York to make their way; unlike most such college
friendships the four never lose touch over the years and decades. There is
Willem, an actor from the West who becomes a Ryan Gosling-type indie film star
and heartthrob; Malcolm, an Upper East Side buppie who becomes a noted
architect; JB, a painter of Haitian/Brooklyn middle class descent whose
Basquiat-type portraits of his friends earn him art world fame and fortune; and
Jude St. Francis, a damaged orphan with a mysterious past whose brilliance in
the law cannot shield him from the effects of that past and whose fragility and
need for protection bind the group together as much as any one thing.
The
book begins as a four-hander as we watch the friends progress in their lives
and careers and observe the intricacies and shifting alliances of such a group
friendship. But gradually Jude takes over the book and we learn his horrifying
and beyond-Gothic backstory. The drama of the book is whether Jude can ever
escape the grip of his Dickensian past--can he be saved? All of this unfolds
over the decades in a mesmerizing fashion, with the tragic and the transcendent
being on closer and more intimate terms than any work of fiction you have ever
read.
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Well
alrighty then.....if I wasn't already depressed, I sure as heck would be after
reading this heart-wrenching tear-jerker.
If I had to sum up this novel quickly (and I will), it would have to be
one huge train wreck that you can't help but stop and stare at the destruction
and casualties before you, not able to turn away for a second - feeling utterly terrible for continuing to do
just that. But yet, you can't help but
keep on staring until the very end hoping for a somewhat happy ending to such a
tragic story.
This
is not a happy book filled with rainbows, unicorns and pretty flowers. It deals with some really tough issues that I
had a really difficult trying to wrap my mind around. I really had to go way out of my comfort zone
(seriously...way out of my comfort zone) with this novel on so many levels, but
in the end I am somewhat glad that I stuck with it until the end.
Now
that I am a total emotional wreck, I need to move on to something more
uplifting.
That
is all.
4 Stars
