Williams is in top form here (State of Grace, 1990, etc.), her outrage balanced by a wise, compassionate, bemused overview....
A highly original coming-of-ager that integrates the gothic and magical realism in its consideration of families, youth, souls, and the fates of species.
Alice, age 16 and living with her grandparents outside Phoenix, rants about ecological disaster and animal slaughter. On her treks through the desert—primers for naturalists—she sees the functions and habits of desert life as comparable to the human spirit and nature: “Plants were lucky because when they adapted it wasn’t considered a compromise. It was more difficult for a human being, a girl.” Despite that difficulty, adapt she does, often miraculously well. Only hours after being ripped off and abandoned in the desert by an adult employer, Alice sits back home eating cheese sandwiches and spaghetti. The story rolls from the disturbing and frightening to the surreally banal, with Alice’s psyche as the roller-coaster’s engine. Her friend Annabel arrives in the desert from back east, where her mother recently died. Her sexually confused and enormously wealthy father, Carter, is trying to escape his dead wife Ginger’s ghost—to no avail. Hilarious scenes between Carter and said ghost raise marital bickering from the mundane to the cosmic. In a somewhat dizzying middle passage that cross-cuts between characters and events, a house burns down, a dog is hung, a 19-year-old drifter carries a dead bighorn ram across his back, a panicked deer thrashes in a swimming pool, a gay piano-player contemplates bathtub suicide, and an eight-year-old poet pickets against taxidermy outside a museum of stuffed animals. In an upended noir motif, Carter tries to hire Alice to kill his already dead wife. The dead, in this novel, are as restless as the living.
Williams is in top form here (State of Grace, 1990, etc.), her outrage balanced by a wise, compassionate, bemused overview. Think Denis Johnson’s world, minus the drugs—ultimately, though, Williams echoes only herself in a risky, frisky, profound book.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2000
ISBN: 0-679-44646-X
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2000
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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