No surprise that negotiations for a television series are already under way; think Sex and the City in black.
On the heels of her memoir (What Remains, 2005) about the death of her husband, who happened to be Jackie Kennedy Onassis’ nephew, Real Housewives of New York regular Radziwill returns with a glib, comic, probably autobiographical novel about a young Manhattan widow looking for love in all the wrong places.
Thirty-something journalist Claire’s domineering, much older husband, Charlie, a famous author and sexology expert, is walking down Madison Avenue after an adulterous assignation when a fake Giacometti statue falls off a crane and kills him. Although the nine-year marriage lacked passion, Claire finds herself at sea. Not that she’s anyone’s average widow; she lives in a gorgeous apartment and is gorgeous herself. Charlie has left an unfinished manuscript about a movie star named Jack Huxley, and his agent wants Claire to complete it. Her predictably gay friend, Ethan, sends her to a psychic, who warns her she will not find love for a year. Her best friend, Sasha, who is also an alcoholic and as shallow as a leaky wading pool, sends her to a “botanomanist,” who tells Claire pretty much the same thing. Neither of Claire’s two therapists is optimistic, either. After six months of widowhood, Claire is anxious to “get laid,” so she goes on three failed dates, one with a successful journalist, one with a billionaire and, finally, one with a hockey star. She meets and flirts with Jack at the opening of one of his films but gets drunk and ends up sleeping with the co-star (think Bradley Cooper instead of George Clooney, poor girl). Eventually, she and narcissist Jack do connect and begin an affair of sorts; it is magic when they are together, but they are together only when he calls, which is not often. Will she grow out of Jack and into someone better? This may be a grief and recovery story for the privileged, but sharp-fanged Radziwill can be pretty funny as she mocks Claire’s friends and family.
No surprise that negotiations for a television series are already under way; think Sex and the City in black.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9884-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Jan. 29, 2014
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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