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PARIS NEVER LEAVES YOU

The daughter of Harold Robbins debuts with a Paris romance in which Cinderella marries Prince Charming, only to find he’s secretly the Beast. Robbins overstates her heroine’s every feeling and supercharges each character into near-caricature. She clearly loves landscape and description and reels off plenty of brand names stickered to the rich and famous. Motherless, penniless American Djuna Cortez, only 21 and alone in the City of Light, has just had her charge card cut off by her surly father, Emile, when she receives a letter stating that she’s inherited vast wealth from Emile’s father, the well-known painter Joaqu°m Carlos Cortez. (Emile himself is passed over, for reasons revealed only near the close.) Aside from her grandfather’s bank accounts, Djuna also inherits his large apartment and studio, his paintings and chateau, publishing rights to his ten journals, and his winery in the Loire Valley. As Djuna reads the journals, the story alternates between her firsthand account of Parisian high society in the mid-1980s and Joaqu°m’s notes about his youth as a budding bohemian artist in Paris during the ’40s and ’40s: his love affairs, models, and ritzy friends, including towering but luminous egoist/hat-designer Mitya Troubetskoy and, much later, budding novelist Pascal Maron, both of whom have been Joaqu°m’s lovers and are now partial inheritors. Djuna’s snooty half-brother introduces her to six-foot African model Navarine, who in turns leads her into a romance with Jean-August Briard, a strangely reserved but blindingly handsome “cosmopolitan hero out of a Fitzgerald novel” who knows everything about grapes and offers to help save her failing winery. Unfortunately, Djuna discovers only after she marries him that his reserve masks sadism. Within months, she’s bruised, battered, and seeking divorce. Then Jean-August really gets mad . . . . Carefully crafted for its genre, but only faintly reminiscent of anything real.

Pub Date: June 1, 1999

ISBN: 0-312-86755-7

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Forge

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1999

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A LITTLE LIFE

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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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.

Pub Date: July 11, 1960

ISBN: 0060935464

Page Count: 323

Publisher: Lippincott

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960

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