A splendid debut by Canadian writer Alexis (Trinidadian-born): a wistful remembrance of growing up, posing as a love letter to the narrator’s paramour. Thomas Macmillan begins by thinking about love, his longing for the recipient of this “letter,” and about affection itself, as witnessed in his parents Henry and Katarina, both recently dead. His daily itinerary consists of reading, writing, and thinking of the intended, and in the monotony of this routine, he recalls his childhood, far from idyllic yet told with such grace that the simplicity of it becomes a charm. Deserted by his mother (and biological father, always unknown to him), young Thomas goes to live with his cantankerous grandmother, an ex-school marm with a penchant for dandelion wine. The two share an uneasy alliance in a small Canadian city, living in a mutual agreement to stay out of each other’s way. Thomas’s early years in the mid-’60s are filled with nature, comic books, and first loves—among them next-door neighbor Mrs. Schwartz, a childhood friend of his enigmatic mother’s. It is through Mrs. Schwartz that Thomas begins to know Katarina, indeed all through his life she is only real to him through the reflection of others. When at ten his grandmother dies, and Katarina comes to retrieve him, a new, wondrous chapter in his childhood begins when the two go to Ottawa and the house of Henry Wing. An eccentric, charming man, Henry woos Katarina with poetry and Thomas with alchemy. Becoming a surrogate father, he introduces him to the world of the mind, and to the world of love through his untiring example of devotion for the reckless Katarina. Even when Katarina finds her own apartment, and takes other, usually abusive lovers, Henry remains loyal to her, and to Thomas, who remains in his library-like home. Filled with anecdotal footnotes, simple lists, and snippets of poetry, these inserted structures serve to bring form to the most vaporous subject: the nature of love. A genuinely elegant work.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8050-5981-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1998
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.
Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.
Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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