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. His novel is a tour de force.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. On a foundation laid by Salinger and Sillitoe, McCabe has created something all his own-an uncompromisingly bleak vision of a child who retains the pathos of a grubby urchin even as he evolves into a monster.
Snaking through Francie's story is his longing for childhood innocence, now lost forever, and just an inkling of the gathering mental darkness that will make the gruesome climax inevitable. Francie tells us all of this in a voice that is the novel's greatest triumph-a minimally punctuated but always intelligible flow of razor-sharp impressions, name-calling, self-loathing, pop-culture detritus culled from comic books and John Wayne movies (the time is 1962), all delivered with the assurance of a stand-up comic. He breaks into the Nugents' house, defecates on the carpet, is sent to reform school, and (the unkindest cut) loses Joe to Philip Nugent. Francie runs away to Dublin he returns to find that his ma, whom he had promised never to let down, has drowned herself. Nugent it doesn't help that the Nugent household is a cozy haven, maddeningly out of his reach. Then a seemingly trivial incident alters the landscape: Francie and Joe con the very proper Philip Nugent out of his prize collection of comic books, and Philip's mother calls the Bradys ``pigs.'' Henceforth, Francie will blame all his troubles on Mrs.
His father is a mean drunk and his mother a slovenly housekeeper, but Francie has a good buddy, Joe Purcell, and their Tom-and-Huck friendship is what sustains him. Francie Brady is a schoolboy in a small town in Ireland.
The Irish McCabe's third novel-and American debut-is a journey into the heart of darkness: the mind of a desperately troubled kid one step away from madness and murder.
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