A powerful and varied debut collection, sharing a theme of loss and alienation, from the author of the highly praised novel The Lost Son (1995). These 13 stories, some of which have appeared in The Atlantic, GQ, and the Antioch Review, could have been titled ``When Bad Things Happen To Good People.'' Well-meaning people down on their luck press on, but keep getting hammered by fate. Spencer's heroes, like the man in the title story whose wife has just left him, are the shy types who, as children, ``were always good at hide-and-seek. Too good.'' In many of these pieces, wives leave their husbands. And in two, ``Encantado'' and ``All Along the Watchtower,'' Spencer's men watch desperately as their wives lose their minds and are institutionalized. In the grimmest selection, ``The Small Things That Save Us,'' a crippled, hard-luck farmer must watch as his cattle slowly freeze to death. Luckily, Spencer has a deft touch, and his stories never slide into the maudlin; he catches the perseverance exhibited by ordinary people battered by life, trying to make yet another go at love, marriage, children, or a job. In ``This is the Last of the Nice,'' the hero's wife leaves, ostensibly to go rafting, then sends her husband a postcard saying that she's not coming back. Driven by that blow into group therapy, he looks around and reflects that ``It's Junior High. We're backed up against the emotional gym wall, knowing we'll never get invited to dance.'' These lucid, wry moments are sprinkled throughout Spencer's work. When he indulges in comedy, as in ``The Hazards of Poetry,'' in which an aspiring romantic poet moves to Venice only to find fetid canals and noisome tourists, Spencer can be devastatingly funny. There are no easy answers here, and no quick fixes. An engrossing collection filled with vulnerable, decent human beings, by a talented observer of decent, taciturn people leading lives of quiet desperation. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1996
ISBN: 1-55970-357-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
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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