This tedious first novel offers yet another variation on the Diary of a Mad Housewife theme. Roberta and Andrew's only son, Gary, has been killed in Vietnam. Roberta signed papers so he could enlist at 17; Andrew works as an accountant at the Pentagon. Roberta goes to Arlington Cemetery every day; Andrew refuses to join her. Desperate for consolation, or at least unfamiliar surroundings, Roberta gathers up all the Trip-Tiks she can, gets into her car, and takes off. She picks up a hitchhiker (a draft-dodger and protester) to whom she can relate like a mother. When he grabs her purse and runs off, readers suspect his resemblance to Gary might be stronger than Roberta admits. She might think she shared a special bond with her son, but it's obviously not borne out by tales of his drug use or hints at his frequent lies. Upon entering New Mexico in a car about to break down, she spots a fortuitous road sign giving the mileage to three small towns: Olivia, Cosmos, and Montevideo. ``It reads like a name. My own name wilts by comparison.'' On impulse she assumes this new, ``exotic, dangerous'' name which, she realizes later, is ``a euphemistic way of saying `oblivion.' '' It puts her in perfect sync with the New Agers and Do-Gooders she meets in Santa Fe. And this is still less than halfway through this long-winded first-person narrative. If Roberta seems interestingly troubled and a bit quirky in the early pages, by the time she arrives in New Mexico she's simple-minded and egotistical. Warloe attempts to break out of Roberta/Olivia's whining monologue by interweaving several narratives: the present, memories of her life with her husband, memories of her son in various time frames, imaginary conversations she would have had with Gary if he'd returned from Vietnam. A more seasoned writer might have succeeded.
Pub Date: June 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-87113-564-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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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