Barnes biographer Philip Herring introduces this comprehensive collection—every tale known to have been written by Barnes—which will be of great interest to scholars and devotees. Others, however, might be confused by the inadequately annotated gathering, since the 41 stories are not dated, nor are the original places of publication noted. Most of the early fiction (written for weekly magazines) is identifiable by its melodramatic naturalism: slangy stories of urban romance that emphasize class distinctions and the harsher realities of city life, featuring bohemians in Greenwich Village, dance-hall girls, and immigrant workers. Then, after roughly a hundred pages, the high priestess of modernism emerges in dark lyrical tales of disaffection and alienation. With their cosmopolitan settings and points of view, Barnes's mature work displays all the ambiguity, world weariness, and cynicism that distinguish Nightwood (1936), her dense, elusive modern masterpiece. There are several stories about dying aristocrats, beset by age, indifferent to their past. ``The Terrorists'' is a scathing view of la vie bohÇmienne (cafe revolutionaries preach destruction while indulging their appetite for the good life), and the particular horrors of modern life are on view in stories like ``Oscar,'' with its intimations of incest, madness, and murder. Mismatched lovers are common in Barnes's work: older women entertain young men in hopes of staving off decay; a mother falls in love with her daughter's suitor; a doctor's wife randomly beds a salesman to debase herself; a wealthy woman wants to marry her footman; and two coquettish sisters tantalize Parisian gentlemen. At the center of many of these mordant tales are relations that lead to spiritual death, if not actual destruction. ``Dusie,'' a portrait of bohemian lesbians in Paris, recalls the pervasive smolder of decay and decadence in Nightwood. The best were already available in other collections, but it's always worthwhile to see an author complete. Unfortunately, you'll need a bibliography to locate many of these pieces in Barnes's unusual career.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 1-55713-226-7
Page Count: 470
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
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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