Gidel makes her hardcover debut with a grand-scale, contemporary romantic drama that weaves together the strands of three disparate lives. In chapters told from various viewpoints (and set in various locations), Gidel charts the lives and loves of her protagonists: Lucy Clare, a small-town Texas girl who was nearly crushed by poverty and sexual trauma; Juliana Van Lyden, a Manhattan heiress whose neglectful, narcissistic parents deprived her of the love she craved; and Ellis Fielding, as an innocent boy kidnapped by his father, with whom he spent five years in the wilderness of the Rocky Mountains. Ellis is the estranged, prodigal first cousin of Juliana; and when, after years of absence, he returns to the family fold, she becomes bitterly jealous of the way he wins over her elusive mother and, later, her stern grandfather. She blames Ellis not only for usurping her place among the Van Lydens, but, later, for her mother's violent suicide. Juliana plots a revenge that uses Lucy, with whom Ellis has fallen in love, as its instrument. The plan backfires, however, and she's driven over the edge, trying (unsuccessfully) to kill Ellis. But these events occur late in the novel; most of the story is devoted to the miserable childhoods of the three—as if the author feels the need to create convincing motivations for their adult behavior. But Gidel's technique works only up to a point and is finally undermined by the conventional, morality-play ending in which Lucy and Ellis wind up in each other's arms, and the hopelessly damaged Juliana dies by her own hand. All in all, there are enough Oedipally-charged episodes to fuel at least one Greek tragedy and a couple of Victorian melodramas. Still, a well-plotted and strongly paced debut, with a sharp narrative tug and lively characterizations.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1991
ISBN: 0-525-93348-4
Page Count: 517
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1991
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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