Lighthearted look at the irrationality of dating, courtesy of second-novelist Robinson (Between Brothers, 2001).
Young, black, single—and mad as hell.
Mitchell Stone just had his heart surgically removed somewhere between dinner and dessert by yet another beauty who thinks nice guys are boring. Nikki Coleman, his former high school classmate and now his colleague at Empire Records, blew him off when he asked her whether she ever wanted to be more than friends. If what women want are heartless, no-good, two-timing Dogs, Players, and Ladies’ Men, then Mitchell is going to turn himself into one of the above—or all three. But first he’s got to get the details right: filling in his bald spot with black shoe polish isn’t going to attract anyone truly fine. So, in order to find a teacher, he throws a party for some of the most trifling, disrespectful, deadbeat-daddy black men in Chicago. His dissolute friend Tony takes on the thankless task of building a bad reputation for Mitchell, aided by a monitoring system that enables him to be sure that Mitchell gets laughed at, ignored, cussed, and slapped by women of every hue, height, race, and socioeconomic level. As Mitchell points out, though, Player does not run deep in his family lines. Most of the Stone men were Do Right types, and he’s really no different. Everyone from Naomi Wolf to Dr. Rhonda Watts, a leader of “What’s Love Got To Do With It” seminars, gets a few words in on the nature and inherent inequality of male-female relationships as Mitchell bounces in and out of trouble and Nikki copes with a lecherous boss whom she ultimately sues. When a one-night stand with luscious Gina later has Mitchell believing that he’s the father of her unborn baby, Nikki realizes that she loves and hates him almost in the same breath. Is he the father, or isn’t he? Only the DNA test knows for sure.
Lighthearted look at the irrationality of dating, courtesy of second-novelist Robinson (Between Brothers, 2001).Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-76047-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
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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