Through the decades with five members of the Radcliffe Class of '46—in a wan, pulse-less novel that has the limitations of the tinny Rona Jaffe genre but little of the compensating brio or drama. Adams' central figure, at least in the first half, is Megan Greene from California: plump, pretty, sensuous, bright, from a modest background (Mom is a car-hop)—and naive enough to get her 1943 heart broken, after lots of heavy petting, by an upper-class type who marries somebody else. ("Well, if that's being in love, I won't do that again. I'll settle for sex.") So Megan has affairs with a Jewish teacher and—on her visit to N.Y.C.—a black tromboneplayer. . . while her four favorite classmates have different sorts of love/sex problems. Bigoted, pretty Southern belle Lavinia, ever-cool about men, loses one beau in WW II, then quickly settles for a dull, appropriate Manhattan marriage. Fat, maternal Peg gets pregnant by a rich, boorish young Texan—and winds up with a swarm of kids and a nervous breakdown. Cathy, Catholic but otherwise barely characterized, gets jilted by a fiance, goes to California grad-school, winds up in an affair with a priest. Nice, feisty Janet, Jewish and pre-med, junks her career for bohemian marriage to sexy playwright Adam Marr, a sort of Irish Norman Mailer. And the women's lives will overlap here and there over the next 30 years, with one decade slurring into the next and virtually all major life-events occurring offstage: Peg turns to civil rights and lesbianism; Lavinia, sexually bored and panicked by age, has affairs—including one with a long-ago, crippled beau (now a rich, political biggie); Janet, losing Adam to a series of exotic women, returns to medicine; Cathy dies of cancer; and literary agent Megan has a long, rocky affair with charismatic left-winger Henry (Lavinia's sometime bedmate too)—but winds up, in a 1983 epilogue, with two lovers (Henry and the black trombonist), plus a new career down South. . . helping Peg to run a shelter for the homeless-and-unemployed. "Are some men put off by extremes of intelligence or even attractiveness in women—put off by superior women?" That's the theme of this unshapely saga—an iffy one, especially since the "superior" women here are so fuzzily drawn, so unconvincingly motivated, so oddly (in most cases) unappealing. Off-putting, too, is the marshmallow-y sentimentality beneath Adams' polished prose. Still, if this has little of the wit and shrewd social-history that lifted Mary McCarthy's The Group above gossip-sex-and-soap, it's probably Adams' most commercial fiction yet—with enough chic misery and quasi-feminist gloss to attract an audience with uncertain taste and certain pretensions.
Pub Date: Sept. 10, 1984
ISBN: 0671020684
Page Count: 390
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1984
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 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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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