A light touch and steady place, though first-novelist Flusfeder’s ramblings are slow to find a destination and turn tiresome...
In this mad romp through the wilds of London, a burnt-out idealist’s struggles against the onset of middle-aged realism become increasingly desperate.
Phillip is a writer who dreads being asked what he writes, for his projects are more likely to involve instruction manuals than screenplays. Happily married to a beautiful woman and the proud father of bright and witty twin daughters, Phillip nevertheless feels something of a failure. As a boy, he was a promising soccer player who actually made it onto the national juniors and toured to the world match in China—where he shattered his knee and could never play again. He has seen many of his former teammates go on to success in the professional leagues while he’s settled into hotel management and technical writing. But if Phillip is out of the loop, it’s not by far: His London friends are, by and large, successful and accomplished. That’s the problem, of course. His gay chums Barry and Sean, for example, are film producers who can’t resist sending Phillip and family exquisite and costly gifts (a Venetian designer corkscrew; a Chinese jade carving) on the least provocation, and this soon becomes a kind of private penance for Phillip, who feels obliged to reciprocate but can’t keep up with them. His obsession with outdoing Barry and Phillip develops at the same time as does Phillip’s lunatic quest to find Syd Barrett, a onetime member of Pink Floyd who left the band early on and fell into a kind of mythic obscurity. Like all good obsessions, these two land Barry in a variety of bad places (like jail) that help him to concentrate his mind wonderfully and, in the end, find something other (and better) than he’d originally set out for.
A light touch and steady place, though first-novelist Flusfeder’s ramblings are slow to find a destination and turn tiresome after a while.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2003
ISBN: 0-00-715773-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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