Next book

CROOKED LITTLE HEART

After a very successful nonfiction run (Bird by Bird, 1994, etc), Lamott returns with her fifth novel seemingly refreshed and invigorated with a further exploration of the world of Rosie Ferguson, the awkward adolescent tennis champion first seen in Rosie (1983). Safely nestled in suburbia, surrounded by loving adults, and bolstered by her success as half of the top-ranked tennis team in the northern California girls 14-and-under doubles, Rosie lives a life sufficiently all-American to include a haunting sense of impending disaster. This sense of foreboding, shared by just about everyone Rosie knows, is personified in the form of Luther, a shabby, middle-aged loner who hangs around the area's tennis courts watching the young girls compete. Rosie's mother, Elizabeth, a recovered alcoholic, must fight the temptation to pin all her free- floating anxieties on creepy Luther, who's really just a distraction from her own troubling directionlessness and depression. Elizabeth's tendency to spend the day in her darkened bedroom is hurting her marriage and scaring Rosie, who alternately longs to nurse her mother back to health and to strangle her for being so weak. And Rosie has enough worries without this: Her best friend and tennis partner, Simone, has been experimenting with sex while skinny Rosie can hardly justify wearing a training bra; a beloved family friend is dying; and Rosie finds herself curiously drawn to Luther. Despite the adults' best efforts to help Rosie cope with her anxieties, maturity alone can teach her to let others make their own mistakes and to accept the tragedies of life along with the miracles. As usual, Lamott's brand of winsome wisdom begins to grate just a bit (all of her characters are on intimate terms with Recovery jargon, and even Luther, whom Rosie finally meets, offers predictably mellow observations). But the greater depth, complexity, and seriousness here make up for the smiley faces and rainbows. (Author tour)

Pub Date: April 10, 1997

ISBN: 0-679-43521-2

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1997

Categories:

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 32


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2015


  • Kirkus Prize
  • Kirkus Prize
    winner


  • National Book Award Finalist

Next book

A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 32


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2015


  • Kirkus Prize
  • Kirkus Prize
    winner


  • National Book Award Finalist

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

Categories:
Next book

THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

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

Categories:
Close Quickview