A slow cooker with an unpromising title offers satisfying, intellectual storytelling.
Mendelson proves she has staying power with this subtly drawn second novel.
The author revisits the territory of Morningside Heights (2003): a staid, hyper-professional Columbia University neighborhood of long-married couples and the chronically single. Likable corporate lawyer Peter Frankl and his prickly artist wife Lesley are terribly mismatched, but have endured 30 years together at 444 Riverside Drive for the sake of the children—handsome, happy-go-lucky MBA Louis and sensible, highly intellectual Susan, finishing her doctorate in musicology and already spinsterish though not quite 30. Lesley has essentially harnessed Peter into a moneymaking career and spendthrift lifestyle that are deeply repugnant to him. When she falls into a long coma after a car accident, he feels emotionally released to pursue more academic and artistic pleasures, such as meetings at the dotty, philanthropic Devereaux Foundation, of which he is a member. Manipulative, self-absorbed Lesley’s removal from the family orbit also seems to loosen her offspring’s emotional stays. Susan takes up with a snide, unappreciative Yale playwright she meets at a party thrown by her best friend, journalist Mallory Holmes. Louis, proving his mettle, pursues pretty, intelligent Mallory, whose parents live in the same building as the Frankls. In fact, the whole neighborhood begins to crawl with significant neighbors, such as the creepy, sadistic critic Edmond Lockhart, who invites Peter over for dinner in order to insult him, and timorous, hysterical fellow Devereaux member Hilda Hughes, who develops a poignant crush on Peter that enables her finally to quit a near-lifetime course of psychotherapy. Mendelson effectively narrates Peter’s emotional frustration vis-à-vis his wife, but somewhat derails the story by dabbling in the petty concerns of younger, tertiary characters. However, the author certainly knows her neighborhood, and she has polished an elegant, omniscient prose style modeled on the finest English novelists.
A slow cooker with an unpromising title offers satisfying, intellectual storytelling.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-50837-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2005
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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