A disappointing first novel by cookbook author Kirchner (The Healthy Cuisine of India, 1992) begins promisingly, but quickly reduces its portrayal of an Indian woman unhappy in America and drawn back toward her native land to melodrama and sentimentality. Kirchner hooks us early with a beautifully detailed description of the arranged marriage of two seven-year-olds in a village in Rajasthan. The plot quickly thickens when the girl, Meena Kumari, is kidnapped by bandits, escapes from them at a train station, and is ``rescued'' by a wealthy American couple, the Gossetts, who soon thereafter adopt her and return to live in California. Twenty-eight years later (as she begins the sixth of her ``seven-year cycles''), Meena Gossett is a successful software expert at a San Francisco computer firm and living in a vulnerably solitary state (her adoptive family are all dead, there's no man in her life). A chance meeting with Antoine Peterson, a novelist to whom she's immediately attracted, disturbs Meena's recurring thoughts of returning to India to locate her ``husband'' Vishnu Chauhan—whose career as a journalist working for a (Moxan) separatist tribe's newspaper in Calcutta is followed in a parallel narrative. A crisis at work, and the news that Antoine has decided after all to marry his disagreeable fiancÇe (as well as an e-mail reunion with Vishnu accomplished by a mutual friend) sends Meena back to India—and Kirchner's novel into romance-fiction overdrive. Meena goes back to her village, only ``to realize how little Indian she was,'' and finds Vishnu shortly before a terrorist bomb explodes, sending them all (for Antoine too has arrived in Calcutta, having seen the error of his ways and forsworn marriage) to the hospital, and Meena and Antoine finally into each other's arms. Good material, and some initially gritty characterizations, are wasted on a trivial story undone by clichÇs and coincidences. Danielle Steel does India.
Pub Date: March 2, 1998
ISBN: 0-525-94367-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1997
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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