A brief, amiable first novel about a medical intern's life that's as entertaining as—and no more elucidating than—a late- night conversation in an after-hours bar. Terry, one of four new interns at La Donna Hospital in California's Bay Area, an L.A. native and self-professed believer in the relevancy of rock lyrics, wastes no time in making his first major career mistake: He initiates an affair with dedicated fellow intern Winnie, whose overbearing mother will soon intervene to destroy the liaison. The ecstasy of new love and, later, the inevitable post-break-up jealousy and resentment only add more pain to Terry's already unbearable existence as an intern deprived of sleep, food, and comfort as too many horrible deaths are witnessed, and perhaps even caused, at close quarters. While struggling in 36- hour stretches to diagnose street psychotics, negotiate with patients over narcotics prescriptions, discuss birth control and AIDS with teenaged mothers, and argue with Winnie over whether to perform painful diagnostic tests on a geriatric patient who just wants to die, Terry gradually begins to internalize the basic lessons of modern medicine. These include how to avoid lawsuits by over-testing, over-hospitalizing, and over-documenting patients; how to take advantage of the letters ``M.D.'' in potentially romantic situations; what to do when one spots an accident victim on the highway; and how to maintain relative sanity until the three-year medical-hazing period ends. Certainly, the interning process has been evoked elsewhere with more insight and passion, but Sanford does add a rather charming California spin—expressing yet making light of Terry's ordeal via the lyrics of punk rock songs, jokes about English ladies' underwear, and la-la dialogue between stressed-out lovers (``You're my main feature. More than just a little good''). Weightless entertainment—though possibly a welcome distraction for this year's initiates in the call room.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1993
ISBN: 0-939149-73-7
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
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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