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LOVE AND MARRIAGE

Some more Mr. Nice Guy is presented for the genial entertainer's army of fans. Of course, there's more fey Coz charm than substance, but that's not really the point when it comes to an amusement concocted more for TV viewers than for bookish folk. The current easy reader from easy writer Cosby follows hard upon his best sellers dealing with fatherhood and with attaining the age of 50. Now the frightening joys and happy frustrations of love and marriage are analyzed effortlessly in a heart-to-heart marked by the surface wisdom of a latter-day, North Philadelphia Judge Hardy. Chronicled is the search of "a wistful boy with a good jump shot and bad skin" for the Holy Grail or, more accurately, a girl. Discussed is Man's guest for "J-O-N-E-S" and Boy's quest to find out just what "J-O-N-E-S" is, anyway. (It seems to have something to do with "S-E-X".) One difficulty in the author's coming to manhood was finding a girl who could appreciate the wonderfulness of John Coltrane, or at least trying to "explain obvious greatness to a foreign sex." Bill's search is finally rewarded with the advent of Camille, his wife, with whom, if the text is to be believed, he swaps dialogue reminiscent of radio's classic Bickersons. There are set pieces about Dad's habit of dropping shoes any old where or leaving the toilet seat up, the male inability to ask directions, methods of sleeping with a wife, and all the comic differences between the two basic models of people. It's a pleasant enough valentine to Mrs. Cosby, but more weight would be even nicer. The nearly unbearable lightness of kidding is the only problem, and an introduction by Alvin Poussaint, M.D., doesn't help at all. It's clearly not meant to be Hedda Gabler or Proustian; it's more Garfield-esque or Peanutsian. Coz has simply handed us another hour or two of the same stuff good sitcoms are made of.

Pub Date: April 22, 1989

ISBN: 385-24664-1

Page Count: -

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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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

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

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

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