by Allegra Goodman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 28, 2006
Top-notch in every respect. A superlative novel.
A scandal rocks a cancer-research laboratory, unsettles relationships and stimulates an impassioned inquiry into the issue of scientific freedom in Goodman’s rich, intricate third novel (Paradise Park, 2001, etc.).
The year 1985 may be an annus mirabilis for the Harvard-affiliated Philpott Institute in Cambridge, Mass. Brilliant “postdoc[toral fellow]” Cliff Bannaker has developed a virus (R-7) that effectively destroys cancerous tumors in “nude” (i.e., hairless) mice. Despite caution preached by sternly rational lab director Marion Mendelssohn, Philpott’s co-director Sandy Glass, a practicing oncologist and an ebullient pragmatist who thrives in the limelight, prevails, and Cliff’s “breakthrough” is made public—perhaps prematurely. Cliff’s former girlfriend (of sorts) and lab colleague Robin Decker finds increasing cause to suspect he has selectively suppressed data, and blows the whistle. Cliff becomes, first, an accused traitor to the scientific spirit, then a martyr; Robin a pariah, shunned by other colleagues (several of whom are quite incisively characterized); Marion and Sandy, eternal opposites, locked in a struggle neither can win, or wants. There’s something of the breadth and generosity of a Victorian “three-decker” novel in the skill with which Goodman threads her ingenious plot through an ambitious mobilization of terse confrontations and detail-crammed scenes (climaxing with a dramatic Congressional investigation and the formal appeal determined to reverse its findings), and the remarkably varied gallery of supporting players. They include Marion’s quietly supportive husband Jacob, a complex mixture of self-sacrifice and guile; Cliff’s Chinese-born research partner Xiang Feng, who may pay the highest price for Cliff’s alleged duplicity; and Sandy’s three accomplished daughters, notably, bookish, idealistic, hopelessly infatuated adolescent Kate. Yet these are only the crest of a wave of empathy (worthy of George Eliot) that finds not only the human weaknesses, but the goodness, and even nobility, in each of Goodman’s struggling characters—most of all in Robin, who’ll never know whether she has been inspired and ennobled, or betrayed, by her “intuition.”
Top-notch in every respect. A superlative novel.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2006
ISBN: 0-385-33612-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
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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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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