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WILDERNESS

A man and a woman fall for each other, but this is a love story with a difference: the woman happens to be a werewolf. (David Garnett's Lady Into Fox is this first novel's next-of- kin.) Alice White was 13 when she first turned into a wolf, on her family's Virginia farm: ``It was the most joyous event of her young life.'' Since then, every full moon, she has become a wolf, turning human again by dawn. Now Alice is 32, and the playful wolf in the woods is a distant memory. After a grisly episode in which her wolf-self killed a farmhand about to rape her, Alice kept human contact to a minimum. She moved to Richmond, locking herself in the basement at full moons; instead of a boyfriend, she has had a series of one-night stands. Then two things happen: she sees a psychiatrist, and though Dr. Adams does not believe her ``delusions,'' he shows her how she can, through self- hypnosis, summon or banish the wolf at will. Second, Alice and her university adviser, wildlife biologist Erik Summers, fall in love. Making love to Erik, she rediscovers the freedom of the woods; she tells him her story. Fearful and unconvinced, Eric betrays Alice by turning to his manipulative ex-wife Debra; in a jealous fury, Alice forces Debra to witness a woman-to-wolf transformation, then flees to a Canadian wolf sanctuary, pursued by a remorseful Erik. Though Alice might be a National Enquirer item, Danvers's whole idea is to embed her in an ordinary world of messy relationships. Ironically, while he succeeds absolutely with the extraordinary (the images of Alice's transformations are stunningly right), he flounders elsewhere, diluting the intensity of Alice and Erik's love affair through the use of four different viewpoints and gratuitous excursions into the shrink's private life. Still, the novel is just bold and piquant enough to give it a shot at the best-seller lists.

Pub Date: May 1, 1991

ISBN: 0-671-72827-X

Page Count: -

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1991

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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 CATCHER IN THE RYE

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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