A touching and sometimes-chilling survivor’s tale.
A grad student dates a debonair doctor with a dark side in this historical novel.
Just after World War II, Claire Wagner is excited to be in Berkeley, California, on scholarship to get her master’s in social work. She worked hard for her achievements, growing up in a Chicago housing project with a German immigrant mother after her father abandoned the family early on. Claire’s brother, Tom, now based in the Bay Area, sets her up on a blind date with Greg Lombard, whom he met at a local gym. Greg turns out to be a handsome thoracic surgeon in his late 30s. He takes her to fancy restaurants, which she enjoys despite his tendency to order for her. She also likes Greg’s kisses, but his controlling ways soon escalate, and he eventually falsely accuses her of sleeping with a doctor at a nearby hospital where she has an internship. After Claire ends the relationship, Greg stalks her, even following her when she visits New York City, where her mother and her second husband now live. Upon return to California, Claire gets a restraining order, but Greg proves unrelenting. Eventually, a horribly violent encounter changes her life. Overall, this is an accomplished first novel. Memoirist Rene (Becoming Alice, 2008) notes that it’s “inspired by true events,” and it’s infused with authenticity, from the mouthwatering mentions of German cuisine (such as the small sausages known as Würstchen) to the pre-feminist commentary when Claire focuses on her studies and career aspirations instead of romance. Rene also weaves engaging social work cases into the narrative, underscoring Claire’s passion for her profession. Although Greg’s villainy is a bit over-the-top (among other things, he’s routinely abusive to patients and gets hit with a malpractice suit), he’s sadly not outside the realm of possibility.
A touching and sometimes-chilling survivor’s tale.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9969490-0-2
Page Count: 300
Publisher: California Country Press
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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