A lively addition to that popular English subgenre, the academic novel: Oakley has fun with feminism and with her...
A first novel by well-known feminist Oakley (Telling the Truth about Jerusalem, Taking it Like a Woman): an oddly dated academic satire about professors of either sex who have affairs and go to the library to find out what they mean.
Each chapter here uses an epigraph from The Second Sex to light the way, so that the characters—however manic or lust-ridden they become—serve mostly as ironic footnotes to Simone de Beauvoir. The plot centers on Charity Walton and Mark Carleton, two sociology professors who get the hots for each other—Mark because he gets the hots for every attractive woman he sees, and Charity because she thinks it's time to have an affair. At times the subsequent social comedy is delightful, at times too structured with laboriously staged polemic, too stiffly expository. "What happens next?" Charity asks Mark, who is a kind of academic operator, juggling affairs and working forever on a book about the "social construction of everyday life." Well, anyone could tell her the answer: Charity leaves her husband (who is having his own affair); Mark can't quite bring himself to leave his wife Jane and his children; but then he does leave them (after Charity tries to kill him). He moves in with Charity, moves back to Jane, and returns to Charity, though by then he's having other affairs, finally a serious one with Tessa, who wants his child. He leaves Charity for Tessa but, in the year 2000, he meets Charity in Amsterdam, fulfilling an old remembered promise, because love is mystical. A large Cast of characters, meanwhile, flit in and out, reading books, theorizing, and doing various academic stunts, some slapstick, some life-shaking.
A lively addition to that popular English subgenre, the academic novel: Oakley has fun with feminism and with her characters, but her situations and insights are largely passé.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 0006543359
Page Count: -
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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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