A grab bag of stories, winner of the 1993 Willa Cather Fiction Prize. Plunge in your hand and you could emerge with a real gem—or a plastic ring. All of Pierce's tales feature women or girls living by their own rules. Men exist to advance plots, provide obstacles, and color the landscape, but they are generally not very active unless they are making mistakes. Fortunately, the women are consistently lively and smart, although the stories they inhabit are not always their equals. Some have an experimental air about them. ``J*e*w*e*l,'' for example—in which the eponymous 11-year-old narrator (a chambermaid at her mother's motel) addresses readers monologue- style—reads like character prep-work for a story. Other tales convey well the elevating mysteries of their characters' otherwise mundane lives. A device Pierce uses repeatedly (as in ``Remarkable,'' ``Star Box,'' and ``The Twins'') is to have one character dead at the onset, offering an opportunity for relatives and friends to speculate on the deceased and recover from tragedy with dignity; melodrama is scrupulously avoided. ``Remarkable'' and ``Sans Homme'' (her best story) star two of Pierce's most captivating characters: Lydie and Lily, women with ``neglected elegance'' and enviable malleability. Lydie, said to have gone mad after the death of her son, seems like a one-dimensional nut to her daughter, but shows another side upon meeting her young grandson. Lily, who appears to have stepped out of a Dorothy Parker tale, is a gossiped-about socialite who is never sans homme but always places her young daughter (her closest companion and strongest champion) before the men. ``Sans Homme'' and to a lesser extent ``The Empire Beauty Salon'' (about a Manhattan hairdresser relocated to Maine) read like whispered confidences; they are truly memorable. Enough of the sublime to make it worth wading through the so- so.
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1994
ISBN: 0-9627460-9-6
Page Count: 182
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
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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