Some nice historical color and a raft of exotic settings, hobbled by the pedestrian plot and a tiresome contemporary...
Canadian novelist Swan (The Wives of Bath, 1993, etc.) intertwines 18th- and 21st-century tales to lead two young women toward maturity and emotional fulfillment.
Archivist Luce Adams pauses in Venice to loan the Sansovinian Library a journal written by her ancestor, Asked For Adams, about a journey taken in 1797 with the notorious Giacomo Casanova, whose letters describing the trip accompany the diary. Along with Luce is Lee Pronski, the lesbian lover of Luce’s mother; the two women are en route to a memorial service in Crete, where Kitty Adams died in an automobile accident. Luce begins to read Asked For’s journal, which also begins in Venice; Asked For’s father, cousin to President John Adams, has been sent there on a trade mission, but dies suddenly of a fever. Rather than submit to the loutish American farmer her father wished her to marry, Asked For takes off with the aged but still fascinating Casanova for Istanbul, where he claims that his long-lost love is imprisoned in the Ottoman Sultan’s harem. In present time, Luce wishes she could escape from the embarrassing legacy of her mother, an archeologist who controversially embraced a feminist view of prehistoric life that stressed the importance of goddesses. She resents Lee, who broke up the cozy mother-daughter twosome (Dad was long gone), and the contemporary story mostly involves Luce sulking and Lee being overbearing as they head toward Crete. Asked For’s narrative is slightly more engaging; she’s calm and self-reliant, never indulging in the self-pity she’s far more entitled to than stuck-in-adolescence Luce. The parallels between the two tales are awfully neat, right down to the Ottoman manuscript that reveals Asked For’s happy final destiny and also leads Luce to a handsome Turkish translator. The blossoming of affection between Luce and Lee seems similarly contrived to satisfy the author’s plans rather than the characters’ needs.
Some nice historical color and a raft of exotic settings, hobbled by the pedestrian plot and a tiresome contemporary protagonist.Pub Date: June 6, 2005
ISBN: 1-58234-453-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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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