Beattie's first novel since Picturing Will (1990): a chilling, intriguing, and altogether deft exposition of the domestic life of a middle-aged college professor who finds his world cracking beneath the strain of a deluge of unsought revelations. Marshall Lockard is going through something a good deal worse than your ordinary midlife crisis. An English professor at a rather woebegone little college in New England, he plods through his coursework, hardly enthusiastic but too cynical to be disillusioned. Meanwhile, his wife, Sonja, is involved in a loveless affair with her boss; his stepmother is dying; and one of his students has flabbergasted him by telling him dreadful things about a colleague. Haplessly, Marshall allows himself to be drawn into a very tangled web of rape, perversion, pathological lies, obsession, and mental illness, in which no point of view is reliable, and truth itself seems to exist only as a rather callous metaphor: "Literature was the study of Them by Us. It was undertaken by people smart enough to make a microscope of the page—or, more fashionably, to assert that things could shake out any number of ways because the page was a kaleidoscope." The investigation that Marshall takes on at his student's instigation succeeds in discovering unimagined secrets at just about every remove of his own life, and he takes to the road—comically enough, to Florida during spring break—in an attempt to settle the mysteries of his own childhood. Through all of this, Beattie manages to keep the metaphorical elements here grounded in a narrative at once compelling and disturbing, and she broadens the perspective immensely by juxtaposing the unhappy marriage of Marshall's father—as revealed in old love letters interleaved throughout the text—with the spectacle of Marshall and Sonja trying to make a success of their own married life. Vivid, rich, and utterly real: this time, Beattie has fitted her voice to her subject perfectly, and shaped her subject without flaw.
Pub Date: Sept. 22, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-40078-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1995
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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