by Alison Espach ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2011
Wry rather than out-loud funny, laced with melancholy and angst, this book is an enviable first effort.
Like many teenagers, Emily Vidal believes her life sucks. That Emily is conscious of her own foibles gives this coming-of-age debut novel a measure of depth. And then there are Emily's sardonic observations of the wealthy denizens of suburban Connecticut.
The book opens with 14-year-old Emily at her father's 50th birthday party. The usual teenage snarkiness is checked when she discovers her father in a passionate embrace with Mrs. Resnick, the next-door neighbor. Shortly thereafter, Mr. Resnick commits suicide, a hanging Emily observes but cannot prevent. The situation grows more confusing when Mrs. Resnick turns up pregnant. Emily's parents divorce, her father follows his work to Prague and Emily is left with her detached mother and an overweening conception of her own maturity. Before she understands the sharp edges of passion, Emily finds herself, seduced and seducer, in a love affair with Mr. Basketball, her teacher, a dalliance that will continue intermittently over a decade. Emily conquers college, about which little is said, and then moves to Prague for graduate work in interior design. There she lives with her father, meets again with her lover and connects with her half sister. Next it's Brooklyn, where Emily finds a new love and begins her career, only to be confronted again by a guilt-ridden Mr. Basketball, now a widowed lawyer. The story weaves toward its conclusion when Emily's father returns to Connecticut ill with lung cancer. Espach's writing is literary and introspective, sometimes indulging in irony circling upon irony, but it’s securely grounded in a sense of place. Even when the story moves to Prague, settings resonate with authenticity. With rare exceptions, the cast of characters, from fellow students to expats in Prague to the post-yuppies of Connecticut, are well-studied.
Wry rather than out-loud funny, laced with melancholy and angst, this book is an enviable first effort.Pub Date: April 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4391-9185-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2010
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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Four 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.
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. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. 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. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. 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. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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