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MARITAL ASSETS

From the vantage of his diary 15 years after he and his wife Evelyn first came to know Weemo and Claudia Abbott, Charles Meredith, an attorney thoughtfully nearing retirement, traces the course of the passionate friendship between the two couples. Though he instantly likes affable, unpretentious Weemo, a child of the middle class gracefully grown into marriage to the Parine Pen family, it's Claudia who captures Charles's timid heart when they meet at a private club in the Caribbean. Without meaning to slight his patient, deliberate wife, Charles leaps to self-assured Claudia's aid when she asks him to explain the terms under which her shares of Parine are held in trust. Will she indeed lose her inheritance if she divorces Weemo within the next seven years? In a legal twist reminiscent of Ducker's Bankroll (1989), Charles soon discovers that as an adopted child, rather than as an ``heir of the body,'' of her doting father, Claudia may have no claim on the Parine shares at all. As he presses her bullheaded brother Gordon's lawyer for meetings, the scene shifts to Aspen, where the couples share absent Gordon's sumptuous mountain lodge and take charming L.A. businessman Jeremy Slatkin into their circle—as Weemo and Evelyn take each other to bed. Charles, lacking their forthrightness, can neither consummate his affair with Claudia nor press hard enough for the legal remedy he wants to present her—though he senses that Jeremy, equally in love with her, has some kind of legal fireworks up his sleeve. Some quiet last-minute surprises do little to disturb the ruefully self- comforting tenor of Charles's reflections. Ducker's elegantly underplotted intrigue will leave the grosser appetites unsated. Even more patrician tastes, however, may find Charles's gentlemanly inertia and his lucubrations upon it less interesting than they are plainly intended to be.

Pub Date: April 1, 1993

ISBN: 1-877946-26-5

Page Count: 312

Publisher: Permanent Press

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1993

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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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