Unlikely but successful combination of light humor and introspection.
Country music elegy to a long-lost woman, lesbian-style.
The nameless first-person narrator is in a state of mourning for her first love, Madeline, who died at age 14. So comfortable is the narrator with her self-imposed exile from romance, and so accustomed is she to silently narrating her life to Madeline’s ghost, that she does not notice that after close to 20 years her mourning has suddenly become darker and more despairing. The narrator reads signs of Madeline’s presence everywhere, and because she is a projectionist at a movie house, she experiences almost everything as though it were a scene in a movie, or as though it had a soundtrack. What the narrator cannot see is that her grief—as well as her habitual references to popular culture to explain how she feels—is slowly separating her from real experience. Two women, her housemate Billie, an exasperatingly talkative and self-deluded poet, and Julia, a serene and self-possessed artist, refuse to desert the narrator. In fact, as she becomes more emotionally remote, they dedicate themselves to helping her make meaningful human connections. Eventually, even the narrator’s annoyance with Billie, whose extroverted emotional life make the two women mirror opposites, grows into something like grudging affection. And with Julia, she is again able to feel romantic love. But when Billie and Julia, despite their tolerance, leave the narrator, it opens the way for an understanding that losing loved ones is an occasion for growth. All ends well, if unconvincingly. Though the plot is relatively dark, it is enlivened by Brooks’s colorful depiction of the secondary characters; drawn in bold strokes, they gain dimension as the narrator realizes their importance to her. Also noteworthy are the dozens of references to films and music (Brooks provides a list of songs meant to be used as a soundtrack for the novel); they are neatly incorporated, resonant without being distracting.
Unlikely but successful combination of light humor and introspection.Pub Date: May 10, 2006
ISBN: 1-55192-717-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Raincoast
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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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