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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

Concerned as she has been with the unique psychic journeying of assimilated American Jews (``masked creatures,'' she calls them in Generation Without Memory, 1981), novelist Roiphe here shuffles shards and snippets from 30 or so lives in one Jewish American family (from 1878 to 1990) in their pursuits of happiness. Then, in teasing homilies to the Reader, and with the narrative distance of a recording angel, this becomes a testament to the universal writhings and struggles of all humans to survive as best they can. In brief encounters, members of the Gruenbaum family are visited and revisited as the author flips back and forth in time. In 1990, Hedy keeps a vigil for her wounded daughter in a Jerusalem hospital; and in 1878, pious Moses and more earthbound Naomi Gruenbaum leave Poland for America, where their son will know that Naomi's (stolen) diamond has more power ``to protect them all'' than his father's ritual garment. (``Reader, you forget that economics precedes religion; worship grew out of eating, not the other way around.'') Through the years and lives, individuals are buffeted by fate, make choices, know the bitterness of finding themselves merely ordinary. Pious, gentle men falter, and others rummage for the good life; there are happy, as well as unhappy, marriages; and women cope in shoddy tenements, in handsomely furnished New York City apartments (possessions, to the newly arrived, are ``signs of safety, a nod of God's head''), and in the stark heat of Israel—where, in 1970, another Moses will die in the desert, a victim of ``an enemy of the Jews.'' There will be murder, desertion, exploitations (the Roy Cohn portrait is memorable), but also acts of love and great courage. Still, however, ``family stories are not morality plays, although they are about morality....Perhaps we are all here to make good stories.'' Moving and innovative—an ethnocentric intuition of the genius of an American family. A special pleasure for Roiphe's following.

Pub Date: June 19, 1991

ISBN: 0-671-66754-8

Page Count: 528

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1991

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A LITTLE LIFE

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

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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

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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

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