A fresh story weighed down by stale writing.
An unconventional flirtation upends the lives of three women.
Trautman’s (Spirit of the Valley, 1998, etc.) fascinating heroine, Greer Madison, has forged a legendary career as a foreign correspondent in Russia and the Middle East—dodging bullets, drinking hard, chasing women and loving every minute of it. But now, “pushing fifty and nursing her third concussion,” Greer is tortured by guilt over the death of a young photographer she’d been wooing. She returns to California to recuperate at the home of old friends Doug and Darlene Richardson, who are dealing with their own grief at having lost a son in Iraq. Hard-living, openly gay Greer and reserved, traditional Darlene make an odd pair, but their friendship has spanned almost 30 years. This visit is different; Darlene refuses to discuss Chris, even with Doug or their daughter, Kate, and throws herself obsessively into homemaking and planning Kate’s upcoming wedding. Only Greer knows that Darlene is hiding the disturbing circumstances of Chris’ death from her family, a secret that consumes Darlene and threatens her marriage. Greer, pushed away by Darlene, becomes close with Kate, whose fascination with Greer’s adventurous life slowly reveals her ambivalence about the safe path she has chosen. The growing intimacy between Kate and Greer upsets the equilibrium of all three women and each is pushed to confront painful truths. Unfortunately, the emotional impact of these revelations is often dulled by the characters’ tendency to voice their feelings in platitudes and predictable metaphors. The shared love of modern poetry and penchant for quoting T.S. Eliot that connects the women only underscores Kate’s valley girl diction and Greer’s trite aphorisms. Chris’ letters home, which Darlene obsessively rereads, are similarly unsatisfying. As much of the book’s narrative is conveyed through letters and conversations, this leads to a flatness that is at odds with its dramatic subject matter. This is a shame, because the well-constructed plot is full of real surprises.
A fresh story weighed down by stale writing.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2011
ISBN: 978-0984850815
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Baxter Clare Trautman
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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