It's Kennedy-bashing time again, as rich-and-venal chronicler Dunne (An Inconvenient Woman, etc.) drags writer-hero Harrison Burns through 20 years of guilt for having helped our most prominent Irish Catholic family cover up a sex murder by its fair-haired scion. After a brief peek ahead—naughty talk, dirty pictures, and several murders are all mentioned in the first four pages—it's 1972, and Harrison is mysteriously infatuated with prep-school chum Constant Bradley, a plausible cipher who can get aroused only when he's beating up his dates. When Constant's unwanted attentions to Winifred Utley leave her dead on the family estate, Harrison reluctantly helps cover up his guilt, allowing himself to be bought off (``My soul was lost, but my future was bought and paid for'') by Constant's wealthy, ruthless father Gerald (no slouch at covering up his own sex crimes) with the connivance of Constant's slimy, crippled brother Jerry. (Hovering piously on the fringes: Constant's impossibly devout mother Grace, his successful brothers Desmond and Sandro, and his sisters Maureen and Mary Pat, who never mention their retarded, institutionalized sister Agnes.) Then it's 1989, and Harrison, visiting a Maine nursing home to cover one of his true-crime exposÇs, runs into Constant's sister Kitt, visiting crazy Agnes, immediately starts a torrid affair with Kitt, and allows himself to be lured back into the Bradley orbit by the offer to ghostwrite a saccharine family bio to launch Constant's gubernatorial bid. When old man Bradley, trying to take uncooperative Harrison out of the picture for good, overreaches himself, Harrison decides to unload his secret and go after Constant. So in 1993, Harrison looks back over the long-delayed trial—and its inevitable outcome. Dunne may see himself as another F. Scott Fitzgerald, chronicling the moral corruption of the well-to-do (references to Gatsby passim). But the main pleasures here involve nothing more moving than watching a wily old pro set up characters with as much individuality as ninepins preparatory to bowling them down. (Literary Guild Selection for Summer)
Pub Date: May 5, 1993
ISBN: 0-517-58386-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1993
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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
