Elegantly readable and sardonically perceptive: literary fiction that doesn’t put on airs.
A tart social novel from veteran Bernays (Professor Romeo, 1989, etc.).
On the Wednesday after Labor Day of 2002, children’s-book illustrator Dannie Faber is gossiping with best friend Raymie, who runs a B&B in Provincetown, about the rude rich people overrunning Cape Cod. The one who jumped the line at a popular local restaurant by bribing the waiter turns out to be the same hotel gazillionaire who’s built a huge, vulgar trophy house down the beach from Dannie in Truro. It’s the one-year anniversary of September 11, an event that quietly haunts Dannie; she’s also slightly concerned about the slow asphyxiation of her marriage to MIT professor Tom Faber and about the arrival of daughter Beth, dumped by a live-in boyfriend. Dannie tries to be supportive, but she never thought much of egotistical Andy, and she wishes 29-year-old Beth would grow up and quit being so needy. Though we view the action through Dannie’s eyes, readers come to realize that this workaholic, emotionally skittish and often judgmental woman does not always accurately convey what’s going on. Bernays depicts with extra-dry humor the Faber marriage, which has long since exhausted its reasons for being, and Raymie’s surprise hookup with the crass trophy-house owner, Mitchell Brenner, who proves to be not (quite) as awful as he first seemed. Sharp-tongued Dannie might grow annoying as a narrator if she weren’t so smart and frequently so funny about social and sexual tensions on the Cape, in academia and in a middle-aged affair. New York publisher David is sexy, adoring and practically perfect—but Dannie manages to find a few things wrong with him anyway. By the end of the story, she’s pushed him into the same kind of part-time relationship she had with her now-ex-husband. It becomes clear that Dannie loves Truro and her solitary creative life at least as much as she does her family and friends.
Elegantly readable and sardonically perceptive: literary fiction that doesn’t put on airs.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-7055-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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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