Newcomer Mark joins the Masters-of-the-Maudlin Club with this treacly and overwrought indulgence about a physics prof who loses his family. Jackson Tate couldn’t imagine being happier than he is in Wendell, Illinois, with his lovingly renovated old farmhouse, his teaching job, his perfect wife Nancy and two beloved kids—until a drunk driver, one afternoon while Jackson is at home working on the roof, jumps lanes and kills Jackson’s entire family. Plunged into an abyss of despair, grief, and rage, Jackson, not much later, telling no one, hits the road (in a run-down van he calls the Quark) to meander slowly cross country, with the result that readers meet him as he gazes over the sea outside a small Maine town in the spring. And not just Jackson, either, since a cute-meet of cosmic proportion is necessary for the very genesis of Mark’s “from-the-ashes-of-death” get-well-card of a novel. On the beach, Jackson sees Olivia Faraday (“her bronze hair . . . whipped by the wind . . . like petals around her face”) and finds himself “drawn to her, as a child reaches for the first flower he sees as being yellow.” Chance (a broken radiator hose) dictates that Jackson see Olivia again when he checks into the seaside inn she operates by herself apparently. Becoming Olivia’s handyman and, with glacial slowness, her lover, Jackson learns that, just as his own family has been lost, Olivia has also “lost” her husband—yes, to Alzheimer’s. Can happiness be found by Olivia and Jackson? Maybe, but not until after Jackson returns to Illinois to take care of, well, something terrible (Olivia: “She nodded. “Sometimes going back is the only way we can move forward.’ She sighed”). And so, amid sighs, nods, blowing hair, and carefully sprinkled snippets of physics (“It’s a pull between us, like electrons spinning around an atom”), things do, or don’t, work out. Let the people decide. It’s a democracy, isn’t it? (A Book-of-the-Month featured alternate)
Pub Date: April 5, 1999
ISBN: 0-399-14447-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1999
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
