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. Along the way, it also offers some thought-provoking critiques on Christianity and its origins.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. An impressive, often violent saga that allows readers to experience a richly re-created time and place through the eyes of a hero unlike virtually any other in fact or fiction. In the most improbable adventure of all, he encounters an evil ``twin'' who shares his sexual duality. His ability to act as either man or woman serves him, his king, and their cause very well indeed. Thorn immediately enlists in Theodoric's cause and serves him throughout his historic conquest. When he finally joins his countrymen, the Ostrogoths, he discovers that their young king, Theodoric, was the stranger who saved his life in the woods after he was bitten by a poisonous snake. Sent packing, Thorn spends valuable time as companion to a crafty and knowledgeable old Roman centurion-turned-woodsman and a winter passing himself off as a rich nobleman in a city on the edge of the Empire (learning to exploit both his male and female aspects all the while). He learns of his unique nature when he is raped in a monastery and then becomes himself a seducer in a convent, all at the age of 12 and all without knowing exactly what he's doing. While Thorn's dual sexuality may prove off-putting to some readers, particularly because of his many and often graphic sexual encounters (even though most are recounted with good humor and sly wit), his nature does provide for some interesting perspective on events.
Thorn, a most unusual hero indeed, is a hermaphrodite. Jennings (Spangle, etc.) takes over 900 pages to tell the epic story of Thorn, a fifth-century Goth wanderer who becomes friend and counselor to Theodoric the Great, the Ostrogoth king who temporarily revitalized the decaying Roman Empire.
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