This proposed merger of literary fiction with chick lit contravenes the conventions of both genres.
Associate in a blue-chip Manhattan law firm copes with blowback from self-defeatism in Buxbaum’s much-hyped but disappointing debut.
Emily Haxby dumps her boyfriend Andrew on Labor Day. Why? Perhaps it’s her punishing schedule at Altman, Prior and Tisch, where the 29-year-old Yale Law grad has been assigned to defend corporate octopus Synergon in a carcinogen-dumping class-action lawsuit. Perhaps it’s because Andrew, a nice emergency-room doc, was trolling for her ring size and diamond preferences. Hoping to parse the enigma, she sees a shrink, Dr. Lerner, who doggedly plumbs Emily’s depths only to founder, like readers, in the shallows. When things threaten to get interesting—Emily is advised to consult A Civil Action for pointers on steamrolling pollution victims; a senior partner exceeds all bounds of decency on a business trip, making Denny Crane look subtle—Buxbaum opts for the easy resolution. Emily engineers the offending partner’s downfall, but quits her job anyway. After her beloved Grandpa Jack goes AWOL from his retirement home, he’s diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, but consequences go mostly unexplored. So does the cordial but distant relationship with Dad that Emily has endured since her mother’s death when Emily was 14. When she finds Andrew newly attractive, he rebuffs all her conciliatory overtures with a harshness that belies his earlier, albeit sketchy, characterization. Grandpa Jack’s death reunites all the principals by teaching them—what else?—the importance of family.
This proposed merger of literary fiction with chick lit contravenes the conventions of both genres.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-385-34122-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2007
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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