Breezy-romp-like first novel.
A madcap farce starring a globetrotting travel writer.
Kate Bogart is making halfhearted attempts to disentangle herself from the amorous clutches of a Portuguese bullfighter, according to her first e-mail to sympathetic chum Violet Morgan, who’s subletting Kate’s New York apartment and babysitting her overfed misanthropic cat, Truman Capote. Kate’s having a great time gathering material for her Wish You Were Here column—staying in five-star hotels at her employer’s expense is an ideal way to assuage the pain of her divorce from Jack MacTavish, a New Age type with a penchant for silly women and sillier adventures that involve getting in touch with his spiritual side. Jack gets invited to join a ménage à trois with his new girlfriend and her girlfriend, but can’t get it up for one or both of them, or so he confides to Kate. Will he ever leave her alone? Then there’s her mother, a regular attendee at the Holy Sisters of Perpetual Bingo, who’s definitely someone Kate would like to keep on the other side of the Atlantic. So many people to avoid—though not Miles Maxwell, sexy on-the-go war reporter. He’s going to write Kate’s column for a while—and he’s hellishly attractive in an unavailable sort of way (he’s trying to make one last go of it with his longtime love Odette). Well, Kate is willing to wait and she’s off to California anyway, since her boss Ted Concannon just got ousted by his wife’s lesbian lover. Is there anything Kate can do? Sure. Let 60ish Ted move into her New York apartment—he can even date her mother. Things heat up with Miles Maxwell in his loft on the Thames, where a standoff with the evil Odette also ensues. No harm done, as Odette eventually winds up with silly Jack. Even the heretofore worthless Truman Capote sires a litter with the sweet kitty down the hall.
Breezy-romp-like first novel.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-452-28379-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Plume
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2002
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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