The first US publication of a celebrated 1968 work that won France's Grand Prix du Roman and earned its late author (18951981) comparison with Joyce and Proust and serious Nobel Prize consideration. This novel, in fact, concludes an ambitious trilogy whose earlier volumes (published in 1930 and 1938) trace the youthful experiences, in love and politics, of Solal, a Jew born on the Greek island of Cephalonia (as was Albert Cohen) whose career success owes much to his pragmatic concealment of his Jewish roots. Here, Solal has risen to an influential position as an official at the League of Nations in Geneva. The story's action, which occurs in the mid-30s, is concerned only nominally with League business (at least for the first 800 pages), focusing instead on the family of Solal's colleague Adrien Deume, a foppish minor bureaucrat who imagines himself ``a cross between Lord Byron and Talleyrand,'' and whose beautiful wife Ariane embodies to Solal ``the Absolute'' romantic fulfillment of which he dreams, and whom, with Stendhalian suavity, he sets out to possess. The adulterous rapture these two share is thereafter vividly counterpointed against the Olympian snobbery and myopia of the Deume's circle (Adrien's parents Hippolyte and Antoinette are particularly hilarious avatars of haute-bourgeoisie complacency). The story flags halfway through, during an extended diapason in which the lovers mutually celebrate their ``conjoinings,'' but it's effectively varied most of the way by Cohen's deployment of an impressive variety of rhetorical forms (heroically translated by David Coward), and by its powerful long climax and dÇnouement in which Solal's chastened discovery that he cannot not be a Jew, and that love does not last, leads to an erotic GîtterdÑmmerung (reminiscent of Zola) that will leave few readers unshaken. Satiric, digressive, meditative, didactic: Proustian indeed in its best moments; cloyingly wearisome at its worst. This is a great novel, and its appearance here in English translation really is, as they say, a literary event.
Pub Date: May 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-670-82187-X
Page Count: 992
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1996
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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