Although Wagman follows the contours of conventional midlife-crisis fiction with a too-easy ending, thoughtful references to...
In Wagman’s latest (The Care and Feeding of Exotic Pets, 2012, etc.), a cancer diagnosis and faltering marriage cause a middle-aged woman to contact the lover she hasn’t seen in years.
Fiona, who works as an art educator at the Getty Villa in LA, learns she has breast cancer in the fall of 2009. Instead of sharing the diagnosis with her husband, Harry, a bitter out-of-work journalist, or her remarkably innocent college-student son, Fiona fixates on memories of Luc, her lover when she was 19 and trying to be a dancer in New York City. A gifted dancer, Luc was handsome, charismatic, and addicted to drugs and sexual dalliances. The last time Fiona saw him, 22 years earlier, he was strung out on heroin, but according to Google, he’s become a psychologist in Orlando. After a brief email exchange, they agree to meet for a weekend in Newport, where they began a terrible sailboat trip bound for Bermuda almost exactly 30 years earlier. As 50-year-old Fiona struggles, in a first-person narrative, with her guilt about Harry—she’s told him she’s attending a conference—and her excitement at seeing Luc again, 19-year-old Fiona’s experience at sea spins out in the third person. The boat’s owner, Nathan, a doctor, hired Luc and Fiona, along with a former patient and a supposedly experienced Dutch sailor. After they embarked, despite storm warnings that grew into an actual hurricane, it quickly became apparent that Nathan had trapped them in a deranged psychological experiment. For the last three decades, Fiona has been weighted down by guilt over her behavior on the boat as well as regret at leaving Luc—expect a lot of navel-gazing. Now, faced with still-handsome middle-aged Luc and his version of events, she must confront who she really was then and is now.
Although Wagman follows the contours of conventional midlife-crisis fiction with a too-easy ending, thoughtful references to Greek myth and musings on the nature of survival give the tale a darker, deeper hue.Pub Date: May 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-63246-005-9
Page Count: 294
Publisher: Ig Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
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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