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MARTIN BAUMAN;

OR, A SURE THING

Nonetheless, the gossip value alone should make this Leavitt’s most popular book. It’s also his best since his early...

What might almost have been Leavitt’s first novel is instead the presumably autobiographical stuff of his ambitious fifth: an alternately lighthearted and turgid chronicle of a young writer’s pursuit of love and fame in the New York literary world of the early 1980s.

Narrator Martin hooks us early on, with a detailed account of his worshipful acquaintance with his college writing teacher Stanley Flint, a snappish, mercurial martinet whose flamboyant persona and manifold eccentricities pretty clearly betoken legendary editor-writer Gordon Lish. Simulacra of other celebrities of the period (such as Edmund White, Tom Wolfe, and Jay McInerney) keep popping up in the chronological apologia (of sorts) that follows, in which Martin fills us in on his precocious youth, startling early success as a contributor to “the magazine” (the New Yorker, of course) of the moment, frustrating entry-level job with a rigorously uncommercial publisher (any of several guesses may be correct), and awkward efforts to “come out” with dignity, find the man of his dreams, and avoid contracting AIDS. It moves along smartly, thanks to Leavitt’s wry, lucid style and penchant for self-deprecating summary statement (“in the language of the human heart I remained . . . illiterate”). And Martin is on the whole an interesting character: both a well-meaning romantic (always on the lookout for “a sure thing”) and a hoarder of emotions who knows he’s been guilty of trivial and consequential acts of “cheating” and “betrayal” since early childhood. In fact, that duality keeps the novel teetering—uncertainly and, at times, disturbingly—between what feels like artful calculation and presumably candid revelations of “the longing of those who have been hated for what they are to be loved for [what] they have made.”

Nonetheless, the gossip value alone should make this Leavitt’s most popular book. It’s also his best since his early successes, Family Dancing (1984) and The Lost Language of Cranes (1986): a cri de coeur that’s intelligent, funny, and genuinely revealing.

Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-395-90243-6

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2000

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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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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

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THE THINGS WE DO FOR LOVE

Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.

Life lessons.

Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.

Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.

Pub Date: July 1, 2004

ISBN: 0-345-46750-7

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004

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