Fleming’s ability to fully inhabit the consciousness of her characters is flawless, as are her portraits of the ordinary and...
Self-assured exploration of day-to-day family trauma, and then some.
In most ways, the Riggs family is completely ordinary, even boring. The family is composed of two devoted parents, the requisite smart-aleck son and two daughters who squabble their way from childhood to adolescence. The one anomaly is that the oldest daughter is an albino, a condition that affects everyone in the family. The novel is focused mainly on daughters Glynnis and Carol, and it traces the standard fare: childhood traumas; the Byzantine social codes of adolescent girls; unpredictable sexual desires; the comforting and smothering nature of family life. Fleming’s adherence to the rules of the coming-of-age family drama makes her clever riffs on the genre all the more potent. For example, in one of the most important childhood events, Carol, frustrated at the social exclusion she experiences because she is an albino, pushes a piano on her younger sister Glynnis, permanently disabling her. Fleming’s unabashed reliance on such extravagantly over-the-top events threatens to undermine the story, turning it into mere parody, but her gift at characterization anchors the novel and proves utterly compelling while being heavily plotted—the girls are constantly negotiating the landmines of adolescence—but character-driven all the same. Particularly noteworthy are the minor characters: Beryl Balls, the former war nurse who devotes herself to making girls self-reliant in the Girl Guides, and who cherishes an unconsummated and unrecognized romance with another nurse killed in the war; Tracy Novak, the cool lesbian with whom Glynnis falls in love at school; Grunt, Carol’s misfit, stuttering, wannabe punk boyfriend. Fleming treads a fine line between describing scenes of social trauma so pitch perfect readers will squirm in their chairs and moments of transcendence during which characters see the possibility of happiness and human connection.
Fleming’s ability to fully inhabit the consciousness of her characters is flawless, as are her portraits of the ordinary and extraordinary life of adolescent girls.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-55192-831-0
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Raincoast
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2006
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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