by Carole L. Glickfeld ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 21, 2001
Luminous with clear-sighted compassion for its imperfect characters, alive to life’s bitter disappointments and transcendent...
A tender, rueful first novel by the author of Useful Gifts (stories: 1989 Flannery O’Connor winner).
When she finds out she’s pregnant in the fall of 1953, 45-year-old Chenia Arnow is so despairing that she walks into the ocean off Coney Island. But the thought of leaving her two school-age children at the mercy of their selfish, irritable father drives her back onto the beach, where she’s briefly comforted by a handsome stranger. He proves, after Chenia gives birth to Devorah and they meet again, to be Harry Taubman, manager of a shoe store and everything husband Ruben is not: attentive, well educated and, when their intense conversations evolve into an affair, a sensitive, skillful lover. It takes Chenia years to learn that Ruben is also cheating (with two women) and one devastating minute to discover Harry is married. After a second suicide attempt, Chenia seems frail and defeated to four-year-old Devorah, but she will wrest joy from life again. Visits to the Cloisters provided a lifeline to this uneducated woman after the disorienting move from Brighton Beach to Washington Heights; now, with Devorah attending a Manhattan private school, Chenia immerses herself in the Metropolitan Museum. Art opens wider the intellectual vistas she first glimpsed talking with Harry, and some nicely crafted plot turns propel her into a happy marriage with a wealthy businessman. Devorah tells Chenia’s story, and although it takes a while to get used to a narration describing events that occurred before she was born or out of her sight, we come to understand that this novel is a daughter’s tribute to her mother, reconstructed and partly imagined from clues and hints dropped over a lifetime. Each character is a full-bodied individual, but towering over them all is Chenia, with her Yiddish accent and Old World superstitions, her ferocious intelligence and biting humor, the deep-rooted sorrow her children can assuage but not heal. She’s the Jewish mother Philip Roth never understood well enough to depict; Glickfeld gives Chenia her due and makes a vital addition to Jewish-American literature.
Luminous with clear-sighted compassion for its imperfect characters, alive to life’s bitter disappointments and transcendent possibilities: very exciting fiction indeed.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-40892-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000
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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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