An overlong yet potentially interesting, albeit modest, tale: like a parody of an overwritten Scooby Doo episode as the evil...
An able if passionless debut offers manners of standard small-town southern fiction—even as the author switches to the small New England town of Strawberry Landing, where a cozy mix of family, history, and unavenged wrongs bump and jiggle together to contrive a moderately diverting tale.
Charles narrates, returning home to Strawberry Landing after some seven years on the road as a travelling magician. His older brother Kevin, for whom everything is life has come easily, has recently been elected mayor and is—bafflingly—engaged to beautiful Emily. Given that Charles fled town those years ago after the death of his childhood friend Gracie, his return offers the chance to make peace with his past—and settle some scores. The first is with Kevin, a big-shouldered cheeseball who stole Gracie’s heart away, impregnated her, then left the aggrieved girl behind. After Gracie’s suicide, Charles was unable to face anyone any longer and hit on the traveling magician idea. Home again, he discovers that Kevin has some nefarious plans to improve the town, among them thieving away old man Hugh’s ancient shipbuilding factory and converting it into a public park. Charles, already with a chip on his shoulder as wide as Main Street, immediately begins uncovering the plot, in the meantime winning Emily’s heart. Along the way, he finds a sassy bartender/bed partner named Wendy, who does little here except perform incidental erotic gymnastics. Though Charles’s voice is apparently intended to show him ironic and bittersweet about his hometown and family, his broad swaths of smarm and attitude grow tiresome, and the sexual interludes are remarkably passionless, as if gotten through with a grim sort of plot duty.
An overlong yet potentially interesting, albeit modest, tale: like a parody of an overwritten Scooby Doo episode as the evil mayor’s plans are foiled by a resourceful outsider, who eventually gets the girl.Pub Date: March 29, 2004
ISBN: 1-929490-25-9
Page Count: 458
Publisher: Frederic C. Beil
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2004
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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