Little’s second is an improvement over her debut (Good Hair, 1996), although it’s still a watered-down Terry McMillan. Her subject matter—the lives and loves of upper-middle-class black professionals—has remained the same, but she’s tightened her focus, providing some real insight into the lives of her two very different heroines. Abra Lewis Dixon is happy with her life, or so she tells herself. Her husband Cullen is a high-roller in the world of high finance, and the fact that he’s always “out making deals” just seems to Abra like a cross she has to bear. Natasha Coleman, her best friend and business partner, is as involved as Abra in their “Is My Wig On Straight Productions” company. While Abra and Cullen grow farther apart in Manhattan and environs, however, Natasha’s getting hot and heavy in L.A. with the wildly handsome, supersuccessful Miles. And when Abra finds out about Cullen’s dalliances with a salesgirl/model, she musters up the courage to set out for California too, but not before she runs a check on Miles (a girl’s got to look out for her sisters) and learns that he’s a notorious womanizer. Natasha refuses to be warned, however, and when Miles proposes marriage she accepts immediately. Meanwhile, Abra is increasingly attracted to a director by the name of Griffin. Griffin’s problem is that he’s white; and Abra, left damaged by Cullen’s betrayal, is determined to find a man with common decency and a common culture. And so there are no happy endings here, at least of the traditional sort. Abra and Natasha will be grateful in the long run, we’re led to assume, for the dissolution of these relationships, but in present-time, the finale is downbeat and rather flat. Little has no trouble, though, with characterization, and both Abra and Natasha are likable and real; further, the women’s shared realization that they don—t need men—black or white—to define themselves rings true.
Pub Date: June 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-83834-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1998
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
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
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