A carefully crafted effort to bring some rather specialized relationships into the mainstream.
The comfortable marriage of a gay couple is tested by a new friendship with a complex foreign couple.
Critic and novelist Bram (Lives of the Circus Animals, 2003, etc.) takes on big and small issues in a thoughtful domestic melodrama set in the last days before the beginning of the current war. Artist Daniel Wexler and psychiatrist Zack Knowles came to Williamsburg, Va., from New York so that Daniel could teach painting at the College of William and Mary. Their seemingly rock-stable relationship, long open by agreement, has been sexless for years; Daniel has affairs, Zack has drifted into celibacy. But they are content and devoted. And they are the first couple in town to show hospitality to Iranian Abbas Rohani, this year’s visiting resident artist, Elena, his Russian wife, and their young son and daughter. When the Rohanis come to dinner, Zack and Daniel find them intelligent, combative and fascinating. Zack and Elena Rohani quickly develop a strong friendship, but Daniel finds the handsome Abbas arrogant and cocksure. He impulsively offers to show the Rohanis his own paintings, which Abbas finds wanting. Daniel is hurt and angry, but when he sees Abbas’s work, he has to admit that the man is hugely talented. And the sexual vibrations that Daniel picked up from Abbas go two ways. Abbas is also gay and also in an open marriage. The two artists begin an intense affair that becomes far more complicated than is good for either marriage, testing Zack’s psychiatric skills to the limit along with the relationship when Daniel falls in love. The affair eventually burns out, but there are scars. Then Abbas’s older brother Hassan, a religiously observant, big-time Tehran financier, drops in and things fall even farther apart. Hassan wants the family back in Iran, where he can protect them when the situation in Iraq blows up.
A carefully crafted effort to bring some rather specialized relationships into the mainstream.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-113834-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2006
A presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
PERSPECTIVES
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
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