A hilarious, scathing tale of LA life.
A debut novel that takes an acerbic look at the cultural shortcomings of Los Angeles.
Attorney Courtney Hamilton (who shares a name with the author) describes her city with gleefully snarky remarks. Houses in Brentwood, she says, look like “Embass[ies]” and are no longer the homes that “once housed families with modest dreams.” In fact, no one in Courtney’s world strives for modesty. Her mother, Julia, a self-described “divorce engineer,” frequently steals her daughter’s clothes, and Courtney’s manipulative therapist, Roberta, gets “a new Bentley every two years.” Her friend Marcie is critical to the point of cruelty, and a teacher named Genie has been stalking Courtney ever since Courtney was a student at art school. But as challenging as these relationships are, Courtney’s romantic life is even worse. Her two ex-fiances, Andre and Frank, are so objectively terrible that it’s hard to imagine why she would ever speak to them. Andre, she says, “couldn’t control his relentless need to be the center of everything,” and needy, indecisive Frank “had been ruined by therapy.” Occasionally, the characters shift from being comically mean to downright abusive; for example, when someone tries to break into Courtney’s house, she calls her friend Bettina, who declines to help, saying, “We just sat down to dinner.” Many of her friends have such similar personalities that they might have been merged into fewer characters, but Hamilton makes sure that all their physical descriptions are wonderfully distinct. Courtney is a constant victim of unkindness, and readers will surely understand her dismay; however, they may chafe at her negativity as she enumerates the things she “hates”: book groups, fake hugs, tea, celebrities, laundry, “the sound of bohemian pretension” and therapy (although she continues to keep her expensive appointments). Readers may start to wonder why the educated, skilled Courtney remains in a place that causes her such distress. At one point she asks, “[D]on’t you think that no company is better than bad company?”—but she doesn’t seem to subscribe to this idea herself.
A hilarious, scathing tale of LA life.Pub Date: May 31, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-9837267-0-8
Page Count: 322
Publisher: Forrest Thompson Publishers
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 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
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