Women’s fiction that expects an intellectually adventurous and emotionally honest reader.
A distinctive coming-of-age tale from a talented debut novelist based in the U.K.
Susannah Jones studies philosophy at Sussex University. She lives with Jason, an antiques dealer whose Brunswick Square flat offers a welcome respite from 1970s-era student squalor. Jason’s almost 30, and he provides Susannah with access to a more sophisticated lifestyle. But he treats her more like a child or a pet than the liberated woman she would like to be—or, for that matter, the thoughtful, earnestly questing person she already is. Their relationship is additionally complicated by Rob, a fellow student whose obvious interest Susannah finds herself reciprocating. She fumbles along with both men until an unplanned pregnancy forces her to make some serious, irrevocable choices. In broad outline, Greig’s debut looks a lot like chick lit. Few entries in that genre, however, are so intelligent, sincere and skillfully executed. Susannah can be as dizzy as Bridget Jones, and her youthful confusion gives the novel much of its screwball charm. But she is also utterly serious about philosophy, and the author’s use of choice excerpts from great thinkers of the modern age sets this book apart. In one passage, Greig captures both the exquisite insecurity of adolescence and its desire for radical freedom and individuality by juxtaposing excerpts from Nietzsche with a description of Susannah cultivating a perfectly careless bohemian look through hours of careful labor. In another, Kierkegaard provides a heartbreaking counterpoint while Susannah decides whether or not to go through with an abortion. The author further enriches her novel with fully formed, sympathetically delineated secondary characters. Neither Jason nor Rob is a perfect hero, and neither is a complete cad. Susannah’s friends are real people rather than social accessories. The uncertain ending may not satisfy those who read for escape, but it certainly feels true.
Women’s fiction that expects an intellectually adventurous and emotionally honest reader.Pub Date: May 12, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59051-317-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2009
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
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
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