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
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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
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