Skillfully imagined, bittersweet portrait of marriage and sacrifice.
The inner (and outer) life of a grieving suburban mom is thrown into turmoil when she becomes attracted to a delicious young neighbor.
Two years after the tragic loss of her baby son, 35-year-old Elayna Leopold has gotten used to numbly going through the motions of life. A part-time poetry editor married to a mostly absent workaholic lawyer, she has been focusing all her energy on raising her young daughter Hazel. This all changes one early spring day after a chance meeting in her leafy New Jersey neighborhood with neighbor Kevin, an artist in his early 20s. She is instantly as captivated by him as he is by her; the two indulge in a heart-fluttering will-they-or-won’t-they flirtation that reignites her dormant sensuality. While never denying that she still loves her husband Paul, Elayna grows more and more smitten with Kevin, raising questions concerning the nature of marriage, the road not taken and whether the younger man is something of a substitute for the boy she lost. During this steamy season, Elayna’s fashion photographer father Devon takes a renewed interest in his granddaughter, putting Hazel in a fashion show and introducing her to his sophisticated Manhattan world. The two bond quickly, causing Elayna to wonder whether her dad’s worldly ways will negatively impact her sensitive seven-year-old. Her doubts pass quickly, and, in her self-absorbed state, Elayna starts to take more risks, culminating in a selfish decision that has far-reaching consequences for her family. Bravely tackling the complexity of sexual life, Hanauer (The Bitch in the House, 2003, etc.) allows Elayna’s ripe first-person musings to occasionally veer close to parody. But ultimately the reader is left feeling connected to a complicated woman who, after going hungry for too long, decides to taste too much.
Skillfully imagined, bittersweet portrait of marriage and sacrifice.Pub Date: June 6, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-7734-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2006
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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