Rural backbiting and stagnation don't create much excitement in a mild adult debut by the author of Fool's Hill (1992) and other YA titles. The lives of everyone in Maddock, Va., seem to revolve around Valerie, a bumpkin enchantress who graduates from college, dumps long-time beau Joe, and jets to Hollywood to reap the fame her hometown has taught her to expect. Movie walk-ons and an unfulfilling marriage to a one-hit-wonder screenwriter make it apparent that she's a small fish floundering in an overwhelming ocean. She returns to Maddock because home is where the heart is, right? Not necessarily. It turns out her best buddies from childhood, wisecracking thin-fat-thin Mary Grace and meek second fiddle Tess, resent her. The three have a rocky reunion during which Valerie learns that she made her friends' lives miserable by stealing their men and the spotlight. As a result, Mary Grace has weight, self-esteem, and man problems, while Tess lives in justified fear that Joe, whom she married after Valerie left, chose her by default. Little do they realize that Valerie herself has troubles. She's 34 years old, her marriage and career are failures, and she has been reduced to moving home, living in the past (via sentimental rendezvous with Joe), and dating high schoolers. In short, she's mediocre—and the novel is about the same. Hall's depiction of life in a stifling, nosy small town is accurate, but the dialogue occasionally lapses into buffoonery as Tess fights off advances from her smitten gynecologist, or Tess and Joe throw a party for a woman they dislike. Despite the marital scandals and bickering, this little world is riveting only to those who populate it. The characters, the readers, and especially the author (whose solid abilities we hope will lead to more exciting books) would all be better off if they left Maddock.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-78422-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 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 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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