Delinsky's first hardcover squeezes a novel out of short-story material about three sisters whose manipulative mother stages an unorthodox family reunion. When she was 27, Ginny St. Clair had an affair with Will Cray, the gardener at Star's End, the home she and her husband rented one summer in Maine. Now 70, she has purchased Star's End and summons her three daughters, who have little to do with one another, to spend two weeks at the house—without telling them that she won't be there. Caroline, obsessive about her work as a lawyer, is romantically linked with Ben Hammer, an artist who maintains a balanced view of his life. Annette, obsessive about her role as wife and mother (and basically a retread of a character in last year's Suddenly), is married to Jean-Paul Maxime, a neurosurgeon who maintains a balanced view of his life. (Catching the offensive pattern here?) Finally there is Leah, a twice-divorced Washington, DC, socialite, with an insignificant life and no man at all. This means that she is free to meet Will's son Jesse Cray, the current gardener at Star's End, and reenact her mother's romance of decades ago, this time with the requisite happy ending. Delinsky, who has offered adequate portrayals of small-town New Englanders in previous works, disappoints even in this respect. Plain old locals- -those who are not transplants from major cities, or world travelers (like Jesse), or artists who sell ``to kings...and movie stars''—are little more than vaudeville-style clowns here. As the story putters along, the sisters, despite years of mutual indifference, become great friends. Meanwhile, dipping into Ginny's old romance, the story sugarcoats the self-centeredness she displays up through her own melodramatic return to Star's End. Bypass this and dig out one of Delinksy's old paperbacks. (First printing of 100,000; Book-of-the-Month Club selection; $150,000 ad/promo; author tour)
Pub Date: June 29, 1994
ISBN: 0-06-017618-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1994
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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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