Bracingly serious but without pretension, Mattison’s voice is like that of no one else writing today: the demands she makes...
A rigorous novel about a woman whose profession speaks volumes about her own inner life.
Again, Mattison (The Book Borrower, 1999, etc.) explores difficult moral and emotional dilemmas without resorting to easy resolutions. Here, 50-ish Daisy makes her living organizing other people’s clutter, but after years of independent and very sexually active singlehood, she’s recently added some complications to her own existence by marrying Pikko, a 60-ish landlord and apartment complex manager in New Haven with a vaguely mysterious past. Daisy is a bundle of contradictions: judgmental about herself as well as others, she nonetheless gathers around her an odd assortment of misfits; although deeply private, she occasionally hosts radio shows and organizes public meetings. While cleaning up his files, she becomes professionally and sexually involved with a Yale researcher named Gordon, who shows her the funny newspaper headline that titles the novel and becomes the subject of a play put on by an eccentric community theater group with which Daisy has also become involved. Pikko and Gordon, previously acquainted, share a mutual dislike highlighting their different approaches to life. Gordon prides himself on his lack of imagination, while Pikko lives by a strict set of values based on seeing beyond the surface facts. Daisy, who has trouble differentiating among independence, privacy, and secrecy, begins her affair with Gordon assuming it will not affect her marriage, but his cut-and-dried, logical approach to life (and to her) undermines her confidence. As she falls more and more under Gordon’s sway, Daisy shares a secret of Pikko’s with her lover without considering the serious consequences. Her moral certainty shaken, she finally gains emotional clarity. Prickly, complicated characters field a plot that includes an unsolved murder and sexual intrigue—but defies straightforward synopsis: it revolves around ways of viewing experience as much as the experience itself.
Bracingly serious but without pretension, Mattison’s voice is like that of no one else writing today: the demands she makes of her readers are difficult but exhilarating.Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-621378-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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