by Bruce Ducker ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 1994
Brooklyn, summer 1955. The Democrats wonder if the nominee will be Symington, Kefauver, or Stevenson again; Walter O'Malley threatens to move the Dodgers if they don't get a bigger stadium; and 16-year-old Danny Meadoff calculates the odds against three teams from the same city so dominating the World Series as he trembles on the verge of manhood. Life is golden for Danny, who starts the vacation by talking himself into a job as a Fuller Brush man working under the even faster-talking John Everett Raycroft. He's good at the work, even though he's still waiting for ``the nookie payoff'' his buddies Rick Rappaport and Angie Valeriani kid him about; and his customer Frances Gunnerson, though she's nothing in the nookie department, is growing into the friend and confidante he can't find at home. Okay, there are clouds on the horizon: the Meadoff kids (Danny and two sisters) are constantly reminded that the family needs to cut back, for instance by having the maid in only Tuesdays and Thursdays; the three boys go into the hole to cover their bets at Aqueduct; Rick's flirtatious mother complains about his father's affair with a receptionist, and Rick talks more and more brazenly about stealing from Bernstein the candy store owner; Danny's father, an overextended importer, quietly moves out of his wife's bedroom into the spare room over the garage as he agonizes over how he and his unsympathetic partner are going to cover the uninsured loss of a shipment of jerseys; Danny recoils at having to deliver a threatening message to his father from a goombah collector. Ducker (Marital Assets, 1993, etc.) writes with the easy charm of William Saroyan, though he has yet to find a voice of his own. It's not giving anything away to say that everything turns out all right, except for Dodgers fans.
Pub Date: May 1, 1994
ISBN: 1-877946-36-2
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1994
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
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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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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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